Say you’re raising $500k. You find a VC who invests in your sector, and a friend offers to introduce you. Then you look at the fund’s website. Their smallest check is $5M.

I’d save that intro for later.

When building an investor list, I focus on 4 filters:

1. GEOGRAPHY. Does the fund invest in companies based in your country? Some funds even specialize by region (e.g. Midwest) but I'd say country is a good enough filter.

2. SECTORS/VERTICALS. What do they actually fund? Say you sell software to clinics. A fund that invests in healthcare might spend all its money on drug development. That’s a different business.

3. STAGE. You can use rounds for Series A, Series B, etc. But at pre-seed and seed, it's very blurry. Instead, I prefer "Idea stage", "MVP/Early users" and "Early revenue".

4. CHCK SIZE. How much do they usually put in on the first check?…