Confession to start: my co-founder and I made up a startup last month and pitched it to 100 venture capitalists. Realistic space, realistic team, realistic deck. We're not naming it because the point was the experiment, not the pitch. And before anyone panics, we politely declined to move forward with everyone, because, well, the company doesn't exist. Sorry for the noise to any VCs who might recognise themselves, hope we didn't offend anybody, and always happy to chat properly. The deck was decent though, in our humble opinion.

Why we did this: we tried to raise about a year ago for a different project, mostly cold because our network was thin. It was brutal. 60+ hours writing emails, second guessing every line, watching most of them go nowhere. We always wondered whether we just sucked at it, or whether the numbers really are that hard for everyone. We haven't seen many founders publicly share their actual funnel from cold VC outreach, so we figured we'd run it again properly and find out.

Same shape both times. 100 funds, sequence of 4 emails each (first email plus 3 follow ups), spread over roughly a month.

Our previous attempt, about a year ago:

Hey, I'm Dawid - one of the cofounders of Causo. I've built our design system and sometimes people ask: what's the reason we plastered raccoons all over our image? Even when people don't actually ask - the answers are:
1) Raccoons are cool
2) Outreach feels a bit like scavenging. You go in a million directions, hope to find some scraps, and then hunt for a bigger prize when you've found a trail of responses
3) Consequently, agents that do outreach for you feel, to me, like an army of highly professional, fully automated raccoons
I've also worked in a variety of companies in my life. Some of them were funded by me (both bootstrapped and VC backed), some of them were big corporates, some even NGOs.
I don't remember ever wishing my workplace was 'more serious', and after a couple of ventures I feel like I have the confidence to say: work should be fun. So raccoons! We hope Causo scavenges some good VC replies for you. Can't wait to hear your feedback.

Hey Hunters

Thursday we're launching Causo, short version of why:

Founders should be building product and talking to customers. Instead, they spend half their time on fundraising and GTM busywork scraping investor lists, hacking together CRMs, writing the same cold email 200 times.

Causo starts where it hurts most (fundraising outreach finding the right VCs, researching them, writing in your voice, running the campaign). The long game is the full GTM + fundraising stack a startup actually needs, so founders can get back to the work only they can do.