Weekly Briefing Note for Founders — 28 March 2024

John Hall
8 min readApr 2, 2024
Duet Partners — Jonathan Lees & John Hall

How to build a qualified investor list

In a recent poll we asked founders what their most burning question was on fundraising. Top of the list was, “How do I create a qualified list of target investors?”, or words to that effect.

It’s not that founders are short of ideas when it comes to compiling investor target lists. The problem is that in the toughest funding environment that many can ever remember, current methods aren’t delivering the desired results.

One founder said they had compiled a longlist of 240 funds to approach for a £4M Seed round. After a great deal of legwork they had filtered this down to a ‘qualified shortlist’ of 38 prospective lead investors.

After reaching out to these 38 investors they finally ended up having 10 initial pitch calls, but only 1 second meeting. Then everything went cold.

They had spent many weeks researching these investor targets, tapping into their board and wider contacts for information, searching through several free and low-cost online databases, and digging through investor websites.

But all, it seemed, for nothing.

The exasperated founder asked us to review his target list. What did we learn?

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John Hall

Founder & CEO of UK startup to scaleup advisory firm Duet Partners