How Besample Raised $1.5M Across Three Rounds From 24 Investors

00:39 — Let’s talk about the last $1.1 million round. Let’s start with the funnel — how many investors did you reach out to?

Elena — We had about 900 funds and syndicates in the top line — that’s the broadest number, what went into our cold outreach funnel. I talked to about 55 people; some of them converted from the cold funnel, some came through warm introductions. Then I got interest from maybe six. We went into due diligence with two funds and ended up getting a check from one of them.

Elena — Then three angel investors — two of them actually made a follow-on investment before the large fund, because they liked the traction and were happy with how we were progressing. We considered them part of this round too.

02:08 — What was the check size from the VC fund, and the average check size from angel investors?

Elena — We raised from a pre-seed fund, Gutter Capital, and their minimum check size at the time was a million dollars — so that’s how much we raised from them. And the three angel investors chipped in for a total of $100,000.

02:22 — How did you build your investor pipeline? Which channels did you use for it?

Elena — We learned to build a pipeline as part of Techstars. They even had an internal tool for building your investor pipeline. It didn’t really help with the outreach itself, at least at the time — this was two years ago — but it at least suggested what kinds of investors and funds made sense for us to include in our funnel.

Elena — We also used you guys, Fundraisly, which at the time was named a little differently, but we loved working with your team. It helped generate a cold outreach pipeline. Even though I didn’t have investors from this cold pipeline convert into real checks, many converted into calls, and it was very helpful for understanding the investor perspective — how VCs look at our business. I iterated and learned to talk to VCs from this pipeline, so I definitely recommend doing something like that.

03:12 — So the acquisition channel that worked best was warm introductions, right?

Elena — Absolutely. For warm introductions we leveraged the Techstars network, asking founders. Techstars is actually really like a big family, and when they talk about that publicly, that is true. Even now, when I see an email with a subject line saying someone is from Techstars, I almost always open it, despite my inbox being generally trashed. And I know the same is true for other founders — when I reached out with a request, either just for advice or to connect with investors, generally people were very helpful.

Elena — We looked at founders who went through various Techstars programs. What’s cool about Techstars is that it’s a global network — it’s not necessarily your own program. We went to Techstars in Columbus, Ohio, but I reached out not only across the US but across the world, and everyone was super helpful.

Elena — That also helps calibrate the understanding of what we focus on, because our product is for researchers — right now academic professors — and there is no such category in most of the tools. Research is almost every category; data sometimes is, but it’s really different. So we looked under the umbrella of EdTech, because it’s a similar audience. That’s where the Techstars network was really helpful — we just asked a lot of friends who had raised before or who knew someone.

Elena — Also it’s an immigrant network. When you are an immigrant founder it’s kind of a blessing and a curse, and it’s a blessing in that respect: you have a community that is pretty close and helpful to each other. I also help immigrant founders with great pleasure if I can.

05:07 — And what about the timeline? How long did the last round take?

Elena — When you say three rounds, you’re not wrong — we think about it as three different rounds, but the accelerator checks kind of blended into the larger pre-seed. We graduated from Techstars in May or June 2024 and started fundraising right after. We also raised smaller checks from angels as follow-on investments, and from new angels including the syndicates, which we think of as part of the accelerator round.

Elena — Then we met them in August or September, and it took us quite a while to go through due diligence, because they dug very deep — kudos to them for doing that. We got our term sheet in October. We also had some legal and IP things to figure out and fix, and we actually got the check in December of 2024.

06:01 — Did you have any runway at that time?

Elena — No, we had a runway — it was pretty short and we were getting really nervous. Our runway was through the end of 2024 at the time.

06:22 — Can you please share the metrics you had once you started your fundraising — for example, the revenue?

Elena — We had revenue; I think we were at less than $100K. In our case it’s not ARR, it’s GMV — gross merchandise value — because we’re a marketplace, and it was pretty volatile month to month. We’re not a subscription service, so you don’t get that rolling increase in subscriptions.

Elena — We looked at the number of researchers registered with the platform, and especially the number of top schools, because in academia and in our customer segment they are the ones that set the tone for how to collect data. More so than revenue, actually, we were interested in their trust and their feedback — how they were using the product, whether they were enjoying it, whether they were getting value out of it. That was way more important than the money itself.

07:34 — What did you include in your data room, and would you be willing to share your deck with other founders?

Elena — Absolutely. But here’s a fun fact. I polished my deck a lot. I worked a lot on my deck — pretty much after every conversation I realised I needed to improve something, and it was a good deck. Yet the investors that ended up giving us a check never even looked at this deck.

08:04 — What were the most common rejection reasons, and why did investors say no to you?

Elena — In my experience, I don’t even know if the reasons were true. I don’t know if founders should take rejection reasons at face value. What we heard was oftentimes just a no without any explanation. Sometimes it would be something like we don’t understand the segment very well, which is a humble way of saying we’re not interested, because we don’t understand why this market is valuable.

Elena — The market is actually estimated — depending on how you define behavioural and social sciences — at somewhere between four and eight billion dollars annually. It’s not a small market, it’s just overlooked.

Elena — We ended up partnering with an investor who was purposefully looking for quirky, overlooked markets that are messy, that are not easily cracked, that take a founder coming from inside of this market to actually solve the problem — because you have to be inside to know the problem and the solution very well. I now understand that we got lucky to be matched with this investor, and I now appreciate that a lot of fundraising is less about the numbers and more about somehow finding your match.

09:13 — How did you find this exact fund?

Elena — Basically, they invested in a friend I knew.

09:32 — What are your top fundraising tips for founders?

Elena — I would say join accelerators. And, just as a piece of advertisement, because I’m very loyal to Gutter Capital, our investors: they opened a really cool accelerator in New York City called Elbow Grease. I really recommend it if you’re building something with AI, but not for tech people — for the entire economy, which, as they say, is up for grabs now that AI is available to everyone. They provide $300,000 in funding and then keep investing if you hit milestones.

Elena — Accelerators, first of all, give you a little bit of capital, which sometimes is really saving you. Plus they may not directly help you with further fundraising, but they indirectly do: they help you frame your thinking, they help you understand how this world works. If you’ve never fundraised before, they at least help you calibrate the expectations, how you pitch, stuff like that. Plus the community of fellow founders is at the very least moral support, and at most they can provide helpful intros.

Elena — Another piece of advice would be: don’t shy away from leveraging your own network. And, interestingly, customers too. Sometimes people just can’t appreciate what you’re building, whereas customers know the problem and are passionate about it.

Elena — So the last tip is: if you can avoid raising, don’t raise. Bootstrap if you can.

11:13 — If you had to raise again from scratch, what would you do differently?

Elena — Let’s start with what I would have done the same way. I would have raised from family and friends for sure. I would have gone to the accelerator again — I don’t regret it so far — and I would probably still go to Techstars, even though they take a lot of equity.

Elena — And now I’m going to tell you something probably counterintuitive. If I found myself again in 2024, when I was about to fundraise, I would have spent that summer talking to customers, not investors — working on the product, understanding the fit better, being a little more in the trenches with the customers.

Anna — Customer product-market fit is the most important thing, still more important than fundraising really.

Elena — For sure.

11:59 — What’s one fundraising mistake founders should avoid at all costs?

Elena — Investor feedback is not the evaluation of the worth of your business. It may seem like if a person is sitting on a lot of money, they know better. That is so far from the truth — they may have no idea what is happening in your segment, and they say no just because they’re not able to really appreciate it.

Elena — The fundraising process is just a bunch of nos. It’s always a no; the mathematical expectation is a no. Be prepared that it will be a no. And it is so natural, after getting 40 nos in a row, or being ghosted, to start thinking that maybe your business is not good enough, maybe you are not worthy enough, maybe it’s not worth doing this. That would be the biggest mistake. The real value is in your customers — whether they’re using you, whether they’re telling you things, whether they’re paying money.

Elena — One cool thing about Gutter Capital that I admired was the way they did the due diligence: they talked to customers. They were really asking, okay, what’s the problem, why do you use it — trying to understand what this quirky thing that no one understands is, and why it is even a problem.

13:19 — Do you plan to do any next fundraising, and when?

Elena — Yes, we plan to raise our next round, which will be a seed, next summer. Until then we’re considering maybe a small bridge crowdfunding, but no details just yet. Stay tuned for that.