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:
Just tried your email grader, looks cool! My outreach email got constructively roasted. The guides are helpful too. Are the next tools coming soon? Be good to use them also
@mike_hill7 thanks Mike! Yes - we release a new free tool every week, and you can also put your fundraise on autopilot on causo.ai. Our agents are powered by the same intelligence that we spun the hub out of :)
@mike_hill7 thanks Mike!
Ivan here, the other raccoon 🦝
The Hub isn't a side project. It's the knowledge layer everything we build at Causo runs on.
When you're building AI agents that do real fundraising work (finding right partners, researching them, writing outreach that doesn't sound like every other cold email), the agents are only as good as what they know. Generic LLMs have no clue which funds are actually deploying this quarter, what partners care about on a Monday meeting, or why one intro lands and another dies.
So we built that knowledge ourselves. Fund data, playbooks, deck patterns, partner behaviour. Our agents use it every day to do work for founders over at causo.ai.
The Hub is that same knowledge, opened up. Free, no signup. Use it to fundraise on your own, or let our agents use it for you. Your call.
This is just the start. The knowledge layer keeps growing, and so does what we build on top of it.
Ivan🦝