Simon Willison’s Weblog

While raising money, what tool are you currently using to manage your relationship with investors?

4th July 2012

My answer to While raising money, what tool are you currently using to manage your relationship with investors? on Quora

When we raised our seed round we used Highrise from 37signals. It worked out VERY well for us, especially during Y Combinator demo day. I’ll describe how we used it there...

Demo day for our batch was actually 4 separate pitching sessions, each lasting about 6 hours (2 hours of pitching followed by 4 hours of mingling with investors in the room). Before demo day started we loaded in details of the investors that we knew would be attending, tagged with the day that they would be there. We also made notes against any that we thought would be particularly appropriate to our company.

During demo day itself my co-founder and I split up to “work the room”. Highrise has a mobile app which we had on our phones. After concluding a conversation with someone we would discretely take a moment to add a note against them in Highrise saying we had talked to them and indicating roughly how they responded. Later that evening we added information for their business cards.

Since we were both actively using Highrise throughout the day this meant that we could see if the other person had talked to someone yet, and figure out if we’d covered all of our most-appropriate investors.

In follow up emails, we BCCd Highrise—which meant we could always follow the conversation with a potential investor all the way back to that first conversation at demo day.

Interestingly, we’ve tried Highrise for other things in the past (like wedding planning) and never had it really “stick” before—but for raising our round it was utterly invaluable.