My name is David Kobrosky and I am the founder and CEO of Intros.AI. 

6 years ago, I was Gary Vaynerchuk's first community loyalty hire. 

I was building tools for his 10M fans, discovering how to convert his fans into customers — that's where I learned the most about online communities. 

Around 4 years ago we started Intros.ai — an idea to help groups of people find and connect with each other in a more direct and meaningful way.

The first time we raised, the market was in a pretty good place — it was towards the end of 2021, early 2022. 

We did a tranche raise — the first $100k was brought in on a SAFE at a $4M post money cap.

We also got awesome angel investors on board such as Sriram Krishnan who put a $20K check in — Gary V also made an investment. 

That funding came in after 8 months of surviving through savings and not taking any pay.

We then started to see some traction and bumped the valuation from $4M to $8M — we were planning to raise $500k.

We had a few people write 6-figure checks — that enabled us to close that funding in a week or two.

Behind Genius Ventures then came in with a $100k check. A few smaller angels in the $25-50k range also came in. 

We ended up raising about $500k total. 

We were thinking of closing up the round, but then we had a few more offers for $500K checks — we then brought in a check from Neo. 

They're similar to YC — I'm a really big fan of Ali from there. He's the first advisor to Dropbox and a very sharp operator in this space. 

The round ended up at a $10M post-money cap. 

Over the course of roughly 8 weeks, we brought in the first $100k at a $4M cap, then another $400k at an $8M cap, and then the last $800k was brought in at a $10M post money cap on a SAFE. 

We ended up with $1.3M total funds raised.

Our valuation moved up as we raised more money. We justified this based on our traction and heightened interest. 

You need to hit milestones in order to justify raising the valuation, you can’t just arbitrarily set it. Our milestone was hitting our fundraising target.

The other piece was that we went into private beta — we had more data on customers using the product. 

Those two things aligned. We hit our target pretty quickly and oversubscribed our round. That justified more investors putting more checks in.

The main need was hiring. At the time investors wanted to see that we had the ability to hire 2 or 3 specific types of people to make the company work.

We already had those people tee’d up — we just needed the capital to make it happen.

We were pretty sure about Neo from the start because we knew a bunch of people who they had invested in.

We received another offer from Dan Gilbert — the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. He runs Detroit Venture Partners — they came in after that round.

The way we thought about it was, if people committed earlier, we usually gave them preference.

We started with our own network.

We asked them for feedback on the idea and an intro to one or two people that they knew who might be a fit. 

Ideally, you know who the people you’re being introduced to are and understand their connections — the strength of the connection really matters.

We created an initial list along with a dream investor list. We actually started with the third-tier contacts, where it was okay if the meetings didn't go well.

We had 150 VC pitches and probably 125 angel pitches.

For us it was the market — we leaned into the fact that, at the time, everyone was spooked by AI. 

AI is making it so that existing channels are getting oversaturated. AI SDRs are making outbound sales tools that send messages to people.

Companies are looking at new channels — one of those is effective community or customer-led growth. We group ourselves in that customer-led growth category.

It's tricky because incentives are misaligned. You want investors to close as soon as possible, but investors want to wait as long as possible because they want as much data as possible. 

You need to create artificial scarcity in some way.

You also want to be constantly showing them progress in your updates to them, even if they haven’t invested yet. Show them you are constantly moving forward. 

Our first round was a lot more challenging to raise than our first, due to the change in the macro fundraising market.

We did our pre-seed 2 years ago when the market was focused on and loved community companies.

Everyone took a bet on one of those companies and many of them failed. As a result a lot of investors were grouping us into that category and didn’t want to make what they saw as “the same mistake” twice.

On top of that our numbers weren't quite where we wanted them to be. Nevertheless we needed to raise due to our runway starting to decrease. At one point we were down to 3 months of runway.

I also had to deal with breaking up with my co-founder and laying several people off while I was trying to raise the next round.

After 8 months we finally received a verbal offer from a lead. That next day my co-founder and I had the conversation where it made sense for him to leave. 

We had to go back to the lead and say that we’re splitting ways, but that I still wanted him to invest.

It was so hard to do that, but we had to maintain our integrity. I was fully prepared for them to walk away.

They ended up investing because they still believed in the fundamental thesis of the company. I think they appreciated the transparency as well.

The biggest thing is that you need to have champions who can help you through this process.

5 to 10 people are going to make the difference in your raise. The best way to get friends like that is to support others whenever you can.

One investor I really like is Paige Doherty from Behind Genius Ventures. She’s super high integrity, always available, and willing to go above and beyond.