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8 Comments

Earnest Trailhead 🌲: Raise capital without pitching

Hi indie hackers 👋 - would love your thoughts on something we just announced at Earnest Capital called Trailhead: https://earnestcapital.com/trailhead/

The idea is that the way we make founders pitch investors right now kinda sucks. You have to decide exactly what the right time is and compress everything about you and your business into 20 slides and (maybe) a 30-min call. Not ideal.

You can think of Trailhead as an Earnest-opinionated compliment to IH Milestones... we break down the things we would want to dig into as investors into exercises with prompts and resources. At the end of each section you can send it to us and build up a profile that's way better than any pitch and do it on your own time.

But actually sending us the info is 100% optional and we try to make each section actually useful for founders to think through, even if they just do it for themselves and never send us any info or have no desire to raise capital.

Feedback & Questions very much welcome ✌️

https://earnestcapital.com/trailhead/

  1. 2

    Going to check it out right now. What are some of the core things you are looking for in the companies you invest in?

  2. 2

    This concept looks interesting for sure. I’m curious if this could also be used for acquisitions for more larger startups?

    1. 1

      Could be! Not our focus though.

  3. 2

    Excited to see where this goes!

    1. 1

      Thanks! It's definitely a v0.1 of where we want it to end up too.

  4. 1

    yes very impressive I am also doing the similar type of job with my online website here https://www.cashlootera.com/

  5. 1

    Just browsed a little bit through your portfolio and noticed that the link to 1 Second Everyday leads to YAC.

  6. 1

    It sounds like a good way to automate (most) of your funnel while increasing deal flow, but keeping the same team size, (if that's what you want). Setup the deliverables in a way that they can be objectively compared against your investment criteria, while at the same time helping the founder to craft their story/pitch so that it's ready for (if and) when you offer a call. The consolation value prop being that if you aren't interested in investing, they can take the learning and work they've done elsewhere.

    Maybe the next step is to give some of them a relevant referral list from within your investor network, (after getting the okay from those investors). So if they don't fit your thesis, but you know where they may fit you can pass them along and get the good-will all around. (Just spit-balling.)

    It seems to me that you recently discovered your twitter funnel is unmanageable, I caught that haha.

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