Amanda Zhu

I’m sick of vague fundraising advice.
So I made the doc I wish someone handed me on Day 1 of our seed raise.

This isn’t a list of feel-good tips.

It’s the actual playbook I used to raise our seed — built from trial, error, and wasted time.

What’s inside:
- How to build an investor list that’s actually relevant
- The cold email that actually gets replies (and intros)
- The questions I now ask to make sure a fund can invest
- The 3 stages of fundraising, and what proof matters at each one
- What I learned the hard way about filtering for belief, not just interest

Most founders get told to “go raise.”
No one tells you how to do it without wasting 3 months.

Save this if you’re raising.
Send it to a founder who’s about to.

Let me know if there’s anything you want me to expand on in another post!

My first startup never made it past $60k ARR.

My second startup went from 0 to 1M ARR in less than 12 months.

What changed?

First startup:

- Tackled a problem in an industry we didn’t have experience in.
- Scared of selling. We burned time perfecting the product instead.
- Paid more attention to competitors instead of customers.
- Tried to cater to everyone, ended up attracting no one.

Second startup:

- Solving a problem we have domain expertise in.
- Started selling before we wrote our first line of code.
- Only serve people within our ICP. Disqualify ruthlessly.
- Customer obsession. We moved from Canada to the US just to be closer to our customers.

Takeaway: Startups have a limited set of resources. Focus on a small slice of the market that you can feasibly win, then move fast to prove or disprove your hypothesis.