My name is Seb. I'm the founder and CEO of Dealflow, a next-generation invoicing platform for online SMBs where you can send and pay invoices in one place. 

My educational background is mathematics and computer science. I left high school with one of the best diplomas in Norway. 

I was a professional cross-country skier for 2 years. I've always been very competitive and motivated to work hard to win.

I'm also the first Norwegian in history to be on the Forbes 30 in the 30 list in finance. I'm a Sigma Fellow and an EWOR Fellow.

While studying computer science I traveled around the world, made travel content as a vlogger, and effectively ran my own little mini video agency.

It led me to discover just how cumbersome, stressful and inefficient it is to send and pay invoices using traditional banking infrastructure and B2B payment terms.

This is the core problem that we're solving at Dealflow.

Our longer term vision is to build a social financial network where payments, commerce, chat, financial services and content is seamlessly integrated into one smooth experience: “B2B WeChat for the Western world.” 

It took me 6 months to go from zero to €1.2M funding and a €7.2M valuation, with nothing but the vision of building a next generation bank for online creators.

That first round was supposed to be a small angel round, but it quickly turned into a €1.2M monster angel round. 

I actually decided not to take it because of various reasons. This was back in 2021, during the heyday of the bull market.

At that time, I sensed that the co-founder I had teamed up with was not such a good long-term match after all.

I decided to let him go in the middle of the round and therefore also turned down a lot of the capital that was contingent on us working together.

I teamed up with my current co-founder, who was a much better match, and we closed a small round of €400k instead from a group of angel investors who still believed in me.

This whole process took 7 months – I learned a lot about my own limits and what it takes to win.

This already sounds like there were a lot of challenges, but the pre-seed was a different monster of challenges.

There was a 12-month long fundraising battle where we almost ran out of money several times.

We pivoted the business. I ended up having severe burnout symptoms and it was a very scary time.

After 12 months we pulled through and we secured the €600k first tranche of the pre-seed. 

From there it was just about getting the money into the account, continuing to build the product, and growing.

We launched our website, we talked to a lot of customers, and our waitlist grew from €70k per month to over €10M in roughly 4 months. 

On the back of that growth, I was able to raise another €500k in our pre-seed, totaling our pre-seed raise to €1.1M. The post-money valuation in the second tranche was €10M.

We now have 10+ months of runway and break-even is on the horizon. We're building a platform for online SMBs to be able to send and pay invoices. 

We have a product-led strategy and currently don't spend anything on marketing. 

We have no sales team and we don't do marketing. All of the money is used for engineering and product.

That means that we just have to run the operations and build a better product.

It’s a compounding effect because if you can do that, you can solely focus on engineering because that drives growth. It spirals into something very powerful.

I look for value alignment and a clear complimentary match.

I look for this because it makes the collaboration much smoother and complementarity.

It creates incentives on both sides to make the partnership long term successful. 

I have a monthly investor newsletter where I update every investor that I've been in touch with. That has brought a lot of inbound traffic for us. 

Because I post a lot on LinkedIn, I have some external status because of Sigma, EWOR, and Forbes; it gives me credibility in the market that investors can see. They typically send me emails. 

When they do, I synchronize that with HubSpot and I organize all investor contacts in HubSpot. From there it is synchronized with Customer.io, which is our email automation service. 

I then send out a monthly update to all the investors that I've been in touch with. I have two lists: one for potential investors and one for existing investors. 

The potential investor list is ~230 investors, ranging from the angel investors in the Nordics to partners at Sequoia. It includes anyone that I’ve talked to.

We have a waitlist of 30 or 40 investors that want to talk to us for our seed round because they followed along.

They can read it and see that you say something and then execute on it.

The most important thing to understand is your position as a founder, including your strengths, weaknesses, and the channels you have access to. 

Be aware of these factors and choose a strategy that fits your situation. If you're in a position like mine having prior experience, then a newsletter can work quite well.

I reached out to hundreds of people. I got so many no’s. At this point I feel like I’m the king of rejection. 

I must have talked to 200 people. I got meetings with most of them. Most of them ended up saying no, but we managed to convert 20 of those into investors.

It was different for each raise, but a few key factors always stood out. You need to identify those and make them very clear.

During the second tranche we talked about our 10,000% waitlist growth. Once people saw a number like that, we had their attention.

From there it was important to create an incredibly compelling pitch deck with a super clear storyline. It took me a while to realize just how crucial this really was.

I would advise working closely with your investors, or an advisor, to make your deck truly outstanding. It takes a lot of time to get it right.

You're essentially packaging your entire company into a single document and telling a story about it. 

That story needs to be clear enough to understand in 30 seconds, which is much harder than it sounds. 

It takes a lot of effort, but if you want to raise money, you should prioritize becoming world-class at this.

I had great help from existing investors. 

At the end of that first tranche I had a lot of people that were interested, but I had no real way of closing them.

What I ended up doing there was joining EWOR – it’s essentially the YC of Europe. A lot of people trust Daniel, who’s the founder of EWOR. He already had credibility in the market. 

I had him and another unicorn founder join as angels, and one more investor that I had to track down all the way to the Galapagos Islands to get on board.

I also applied a tactic that I call an 'email signature round.’

This works by sending an email to a group of investors, cc’ing everyone so they can see each other's replies.

In the email, you state: ‘Hey, we're closing this round now. We have this much committed, and we're raising a maximum of X amount, closing on X date.'

Then you add, 'please let me know on this thread if you want to join.'

Your lead investor replies with something like, 'Let's do this; we're excited — this is going to the moon!' Then another lead or syndicate chimes in with similar enthusiasm.

This generates excitement as people see credible investors getting involved, prompting them to jump in too.

Through this strategy, we raised an additional €50k-100k, which allowed us to close the round.

Prior to building DealFlow, I was the founding CMO of a B2C fintech app, where we created a cash back solution for consumers. 

I played an instrumental role in raising the first institutional VC round there, and building a growth engine that took that company to several hundred thousand users in Norway & Denmark. 

I raised €500k for this company, but I was actually let go right afterwards due to strategic misalignments with the CEO.

It was very tough for me because at that time I had just dropped out of university, left everything behind in my small hometown in Norway and moved to another country to join this company. 

I felt like I'd lost everything. Somewhere along my journey, I learned that each crisis in itself is a great opportunity to level up if you find the courage to do so. 

In my darkest moment I decided to start my own company instead of folding. This is what later became Dealflow. 

In the first tranche of the pre-seed round, I was missing one compliance-focused investor to form the final lead syndicate. Without this it would not be possible to close the round. 

We'd been raising for a long time. I was burnt out, looking everywhere and everywhere I could. It was in the middle of the recession and people were scared. 

It was only when I traveled to the Galapagos Islands that I met this investment banker from New York that wanted to join and wanted to take the risk. 

His name is Christopher Creatura and he’s a sharp, standup guy, with a hands-on approach that was super valuable to us. 

I literally had to go all the way to the Pacific Ocean from Europe to close the round. We shook hands while learning about Charles Darwin’s risky journey to the island, walking amongst giant tortoises.

You need to think of fundraising as a completely separate activity from building your company.

You could have the same product, company, and team as a competitor, but if your deck is average, you might not raise any money.

If you build your deck with an insider investor who knows the game along with the right language to use, you can raise €10M – it really is that extreme.

Investors have thousands of deals coming their way and limited attention. They don't have the time to go in-depth on every opportunity.

The one thing they judge your company-building abilities on is your ability to tell a compelling story in your deck.

You could be the best founder in the world, but if you can't translate that into a story that excites investors, you'll struggle to raise money.

In Europe I'd recommend you to find a way to work with Daniel Dippold from EWOR. 

He is one of those exceptional guys that has the analytical intelligence required to break down, go in depth and understand very technical things.

He has highly developed social and communication abilities along with a risk appetite that allows you to make bold bets. 

He knows a lot of people, he's young, hungry, and willing to take risky bets, which is rare to find in Europe.

Ralph Reichert from ESL and Petter Made, one of the co-founders of SumUp, also both deserve a mention. They supported me through very tough times and really took a bet on me.

I hear a lot of founders talk about reading books, and I previously did a lot of that.

But I've found the fastest way to learn things in a way that allows you to approach things from first principles is to take a lot of action. 

As the founder of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong says, “action produces information.” 

If you continue executing and have a rigorous process for recaps, that will exponentially accelerate your learning. 

Isolating the core problem and being honest with yourself about what actually happened, even though it might hurt your ego, is really important to think about. You’d be surprised how much you can learn.

I think VC as we know it is on a downtrend and that the VC career path might not be as promising as it once was.

If interested in joining Dealflow, learn more here.