A brief history:

I’ve been trying to get one of my startups featured on AngelList for a long time. I first tried in 2011 with a previous company and I got my first rejection:

“too early” is a common theme throughout this blog post.

I did circle back, but our metrics were never material enough to be featured.

At the time I lived in the same condo complex as AngelList’s headquarters. Their office view looked directly down on to a small piece of land that was only accessible from the unit I lived in.

Every day while I took my dog out for her daily routine I could see the AngelList team working hard and I was reminded daily that my company wasn’t good enough to be seen on AngelList… Even though they saw me everyday.

Bliss Syndicate — The Pursuit

The AngelList model has changed significantly from when I first tried to get featured 5 years ago. These days, the best way to raise money is through a syndicate.

In May, when Bliss first started efforts toward raising a seed round, I wanted AngelList to be part of the overall fundraising strategy, but I knew we were too early to get an investor to lead our syndicate, having only generated $1k in revenue and zero investors (we were self-funded), but I wanted to start planting the seeds.

I immediately thought of the SaaS syndicate as a good target to go after. I had been actively keeping track of their investment activity on AngelList and I knew this syndicate was active in funding early stage recurring revenue startups.

Upon further research, I identified Kyle York, one of the founders of the SaaS syndicate and Chief Strategy Officer at SaaS-based Internet Performance company, Dyn, as the person I wanted to talk to.

The things that stood out most to me were the references he’s received and given on AngelList and LinkedIn. Combine this with his Twitter feed (I did thorough due diligence), I felt I already knew him even though we had never had a conversation. Not to mention, he has such a fantastic surname… we were meant to work together!

I combed through my contacts and found a warm introduction:

Thanks for the intro, Arjun, but am I wonderful too??

The above email correspondence was handled by Kyle’s executive assistant, Ashley, rather than Kyle himself. We had arranged an introductory phone call, but Kyle rescheduled three different times…through Ashley!

We finally had our call on June 9th. It was a short and sweet 18 minute call. Kyle showed a tiny bit of interest, but told us that we were too early for the SaaS syndicate and suggested I get back in touch with him when Bliss reached $8k a month recurring revenue (MRR).

Not a great start, but at least I had some direction.

PERSEVERANCE

A lot of entrepreneurs would get discouraged here, but I made sure to stay on top of Kyle’s mind. For the following months I kept Kyle informed of relevant business updates and thoughtfully engaged him over Twitter. Once we hit $8k MRR in October (5 months later) he started to show interest in Bliss.

This time around Kyle dove deeper into understanding the business and became excited about what we were working on. With $8k MRR and strong month over month revenue growth Kyle presented Bliss to the SaaS syndicate, but ultimately they determined that Bliss was still too early for them to lead the investment.

Determined to raise through AngelList and work directly with Kyle, we came to a solution — Have Kyle lead the Bliss syndicate personally! Needless to say, we were excited that Kyle took this on. He was the partner we wanted from the get-go and the 5+ months of patience and commitment paid off. We had our lead investor to raise money on AngelList!

Starting From Scratch

One potential downfall of being the first deal through a syndicate is that it might not be mature enough to drive a lot of investors into the deal. With that comes more grassroots efforts to drive awareness.

Kyle started his syndicate on October 12th and we got to work generating support. Over the following few weeks I reached out to my contacts asking them to sign up for Kyle’s syndicate.

I sent messages to my contacts through Slack, email, LinkedIn and more.

This was an unsuccessful campaign for me, but I learned some key lessons that should be helpful to anyone who finds themselves in a similar circumstance.

Because AngelList still hadn’t yet approved the Bliss deal, there was no direct link to have investors show interest in or start investing in Bliss. I was sending my contacts, who didn’t know Kyle, directly to his syndicate, which had no mention of my company. On top of this, most people weren’t overly familiar with how AngelList syndicates work, which only further complicated matters.

Lesson learned: wait until the deal is approved and live!

In hindsight, as a founder of a company that is about to get syndicated, there’s not a lot that you can do before a deal goes live; as anxious as you might be to generate interest. Avoiding friction with your contacts is of high importance, so it’s better to just wait until the deal gets approved by AngelList and there’s a direct link that sends investors to invest in your company.

On the flip side, one thing that did work well for me was directly talking to investors letting them know that Bliss would be live on AngelList soon. It allowed me to gauge their interest and answer any questions in preparation of the syndicate going live.

APPROVAL PROCESS

Getting the Bliss syndicate approved by AngelList was not a straight forward process either. Kyle spent a couple of weeks communicating with the AngelList team explaining the opportunity, walking them through our business and showing them his new syndicate had enough support to ensure a successful fundraise for Bliss.

Fortunately, Kyle had a lot more success generating interest and support for his syndicate than I did. While I only got 2 investors to sign up, Kyle grew the syndicate to more than $300,000 from backers.

In terms of Kyle and I collaborating to streamline the administrative process, we utilized Google Docs to efficiently create the ‘Deal Overview’ for Bliss. This overview gets sent out to all investors that backed Kyle’s syndicate to explain the investment opportunity — so it’s an important task and piece of collateral.