Show HN: I built a bot that finds investors and gets meetings with them | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a bot that finds investors and gets meetings with them

shizune.co

10 pointspavelgvay3 comments

When I was fundraising for my previous startup, finding investors and getting meetings with them became my full-time job for almost three months. Because I had some experience building chatbots, I thought I could make one to automate investor research and outreach.

After 9 months of idea validation and development, I introduce you to Shizune. It can do two things: a) find investors tailored to your startup b) get meetings with them by automating warm intros and cold emails.

First, Shizune finds all investors who invested in companies similar to your startup. Then it researches all of them, scraping data from over 20+ data sources. In the end, it picks the most active investors in your industry, stage, and country. This approach helps us to make sure that the investors will be interested in your startup and have already invested in startups like yours before.

Once the list of investors is ready, Shizune can reach out to people on your behalf, ask for intros/send cold emails, and schedule meetings.

The outreach part is still in development because the demand for getting meetings was low. Currently, we're experimenting with NLU and text generation platforms to prototype the MVP of this feature.

We launched the MVP a couple of days ago. Now we want to ship updates every 2 weeks, but my partner is part-time, and it slows us down a lot. The current plan is to: a) finish the core features with no-code to monetize the product ASAP b) focus on user acquisition to start making enough money to pay the salary for my partner. Any advice on this situation would be appreciated. :)

Automated messaging to ask for meetings sure sounds like sales spam to me - what are you doing that makes this approach not just spam?

Currently, there is no automated messaging yet, and we're doing the outreach manually. So we just don't work with people who want to get meetings by spamming investors. We only work with the customers who need help with getting intros from the people they already know.

I have 3 anti-spam hypotheses to test:

1/ Daily message limits. Spamming only works if you send large volumes of emails. Strict daily limits should make our tool not suitable for spammers.

2/ Allow the "intro ask" emails to 1st-degree connections only.

3/ Allow cold emails to relevant investors only.

I hope all these restrictions will guide our users to use our tool as intended - for building healthy relationships with investors using healthy methods.

If the restrictions won't work, I'm going to figure out something else. As Michael Siebel once said, startups should choose their customers carefully. We want to build an investor relationships management platform, and there is no place for spammers.

Any suggestions on fighting spammers are welcome.

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