FundraisingHackers.com’s Post

⁉️ Folks have asked me — why FundraisingHackers.com bootcamps? Why have you chosen this format and what motivates you to keep hosting them? Simply said — because they work. Founders actually learn a ton (and most importantly, do a ton) and fundraising becomes much easier (and more effective). A combination of 1-1 coaching and group accountability (plus office hours) is a really powerful booster. But honestly, what Slava Solonitsyn and I realized is that 1-2-3 month bootcamps are a perfect way to observe the founders — how organized they are, how confident they are, and how coachable they are. With bootcamps, we get to be their peers and not investors — which allows us to have much more intimate relationships (from the perspective of sharing struggles and challenges, of course — not the other thing you could have thought about). Since we don’t position the bootcamp as “we only support the top 1% of founders” the whole thing is much more democratized. We want to help underserved founders — and while we have a screening process, we only turn down folks who are not a good fit stage/context/culture-wise. We also treat bootcamps as a funnel for startups we would want to work with longer-term (as angels, advisors, or any other format). And this works too — I’m currently continuing to actively help a bunch of the founders post-bootcamps. On top of that, every FH member can always count on me to help them passively without asking for anything in return. And yeah — we don’t want to do all of the above for free for a very simple reason — lack of accountability from all sides. We’ve made it a point to actively share free content with you, and the community, and have already executed our promise — hosting webinars, sharing playbooks, etc (if you haven’t yet received links from me, comment with “ ” below and I'll do my best to send them to you). But there’s so much more we can share that simply can’t be recorded. Before that, Slava only shared private stuff in a 1-1 context via coaching/advising, but now we’re doing this as part of the bootcamp because we know and trust our community members. And of course, since we’re doing this, we at least want people to value it from the time commitment perspective, thus the price to joining the bootcamp. To put it mildly — we don’t want to have folks who don’t value our experience as cohort members. #fundraising #startups