Investor lists, spreadsheets, and the friend who knows a guy
Every founder raising for the first time ends up with one of three things: a spreadsheet somebody shared, a free database with tens of thousands of investors in it, or a name from someone who knows someone. All three are free. All three hand you names and stop there.
The spreadsheet
Someone posts a list of two thousand seed investors and it spreads. The data is often real, sometimes accurate, and it cost nothing.
Then you open it. Two thousand rows, columns for stage and sector, and nothing that tells you which forty are worth writing to. So you filter by sector, which is the filter that fails last, and you email a hundred firms that fund a different layer of the stack than the one you build on.
The free database
Better tooling, same shape. A searchable platform, filters for stage and geography and check size, a way to send your deck and see who opened it. OpenVC is one of the better known and it is genuinely useful: it lists over twenty thousand investor profiles, it is free, and founders raise with it.
What it does not do is decide. Filters narrow the list. The judgement about which of the survivors can actually fund a company like yours is still yours to make, one firm at a time, from public pages that describe what each fund would like to be true about itself.
The friend who knows a guy
The warmest option and the least reliable. One name, no context, and an obligation attached. If the fit is real it is the best introduction you will get. If it is not, you have spent social capital and three weeks to find that out.
Our own outreach data says a warm introduction lifts the first reply and the first meeting, then makes no measurable difference to whether a founder moves toward a round.
What all three have in common
Each one gives you names and leaves you the research, and the research is the expensive part. For every firm you would need its real stage behaviour rather than its stated one, its recent check sizes, whether it still leads, and whether anything in its history rhymes with your company. Done honestly for eighty firms that takes longer than most founders have, which is why almost nobody finishes it.
A raise costs a founder somewhere between 400 and 500 hours. Most of those hours go to investors who were never going to say yes, for reasons that were knowable before the first email went out.
The difference
| A list or free database | CherryPitch | |
|---|---|---|
| Who works out which ones fit | You | We do |
| What comes with each name | Contact details | A reason drawn from that investor's own record |
| What you do with twenty thousand rows | Filter, guess, send | You never see them |
| Where your time goes | Researching investors | Talking to the right ones |
Which to use
If you are researching a market, or you are early and want to see the shape of the landscape, take the free list. It costs nothing and it will teach you something.
If you are raising now, the list was never your problem. Deciding is your problem.