""The first check is always the hardest to get. It took me months of practice to just get the elevator pitch straight. Investors are very often numbers people — they love math and statistics and letting them know you speak that same language is important."
The first check is always the hardest to get.
I began the fundraising process by making a list of people I could pitch or get introductions to that invest in similar companies. I would say that getting introductions as a young entrepreneur is the hardest thing, because people weren't sure that I could rock the pitch, or that I would stick with the company instead of pursuing another grand idea tomorrow. I got a lot of resistance to introductions in the early days, so I went to startup events where investors speak.
Scentbird was bootstrapped for the first 10 months or so. We tried raising money from angel investors, but the business was in its nascent stages and that didn't prove successful. So our original way of hacking the funding game was getting into Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, which is an accelerator program in NYC. That provided the initial $40,000 of outside capital. Once our business model was perfected and we started getting real traction, we raised our first $100,000 check from an angel investor and that really helped solidify some early momentum." — Mariya Nurislamova, CEO & cofounder of Scentbird and Deck of Scarlet
Image Source: Courtesy Mariya Nurislamova