137. Prepare Follow Up Materials In Advance feat. Neha Govindraj, CEO @ Bonside

If I were to redo the fundraising process, there's a lot of follow-ups coming out of conversations. There were so many questions that came up. Some that were transactional, so, you know, can you send me x piece of data, y piece of information? Some that was a reaction to a statement I said. So if I said,"this part of the industry is booming," and they would say,"oh, I would love to dig into that, I'd love to understand that a little bit further." In hindsight, I probably could have predicted that. And I probably could have just upfront said, this is my story that I'm going in with and these are the like five different directions that it can go in, depending on which part of the story they bite. And let me do a little bit of work along each of those verticals so that way I have really powerful follow-ups that I can just immediately send without having to create work for myself in the middle of the process. It's kind of honestly like applying to colleges. I just did everything up upfront. I was like, I'm gonna write all of my essays up front. I'm gonna write all of this stuff up front. I'm gonna submit my early decision application, and I'm also just gonna submit all of my other applications. And so that way if my ED came back, no, I didn't have to do work in the middle of the process. I just, everything else was fired off. And fortunately my ED came back yes. But you know I ended up paying for all those college apps that I didn't need to. But I think it was just this matter of, I'm gonna prepare upfront and I'm just gonna create all of these materials so that way when I'm in the process, I'm really focused on the process. I'm not leaving a meeting feeling like I need to create some materials. You can really sort of engineer the conversation. If you have a day where you just have eight conversations, you'll get a sense of what the latest thinking is in venture. What the latest conversation is, what everyone's talking about. And you'll find, oh, okay, these are the three trends that are emerging from those conversations. Let me hit pause. Let me reflect on my pitch. Let me see what backup materials I need to do to counteract some of that thinking or enforce some of that thinking. And then let me actually start again.