I'm Ray Denis, founder and CEO of Sandbox Wealth. 

We're building a turnkey banking solution for independent financial advisors, insurance carriers, family offices, and other bank-adjacent firms that don’t have access to a bank. 

We enable these partners to deepen their best relationships and drive organic growth by offering deposit accounts, residential mortgages, art loans, and aircraft loans.

We also offer different liquidity and hedging solutions, primarily geared towards wealthy individuals.

The journey has been lengthy. We started ideating and building out the wireframes back in February 2023. 

It was right after the peak and right at the beginning of the trough that we're in regarding fundraising. 

It takes a while to build something that is relevant to our target clients.

Despite having almost 20 years of experience in banking, primarily at large institutions, going out on your own is a completely different animal. 

I underestimated how long it would take to build the product and to get to a ‘yes’ from an investor. 

We ended up getting our first yes by having a semi-symbiotic relationship instead of one side extracting value from the other.

We raised $100k, but that first yes meant a lot more than the dollar amount associated with it. It was validation for the trajectory we were on and what we were trying to accomplish. 

And it was from a big-name investor; we had Northwestern Mutual write the check.

They're not just a big name investor, they're also a target partner of ours. 

It was a realization that the product could work, that we were headed in the right direction, and that we should’ve been focused raising from a strategic investor earlier on, rather than spraying and praying.

It was an uncapped round. There’s going to be a lot more to the story once we close the larger round we’re currently raising.

That first $100k is part of a larger round that we're currently in the middle of raising. We're looking at raising $2M in aggregate. 

This first portion will be used to finalize our MVP. We had most of our product built when we got into this 3-month accelerator program.

The objective through those 3 months was to finalize that MVP and get our first pilot users on board.

It’s also being used to finalize other foundational items.

This includes getting our SOC 2 compliance sorted out, along with getting our initial team in place by hiring a couple of really talented engineers.

The answer is easy, but the process wasn't. I figured that because I had almost 20 years of experience in banking and lending that I had a pretty solid resume.

I was at JP Morgan for a while, Deutsche Bank, and then Raymond James where I ran a lending business there for a few years. I then closed it out with BofA. I've built and rebuilt businesses within the context of these larger firms. 

I figured I could go to any VC and tell them that story, and they'd hand me $2M — I learned that it’s not quite that easy. 

Instead of just spraying and praying with any VC, I focused on stage-specific VCs. We still got tons of no's.

Something that's gotten us over the hump with some investors is forming legitimate partnerships with real dollars involved.

This has helped us identify better investors because they speak the same language, understand the market, and have relationships with RIAs or family offices that we can leverage. 

They also have subject matter experts that are either in-house or operate as venture partners with these firms. 

All this to say that it's been a natural migration towards this point where you hear enough no's from a lot of different people and eventually veer into the right people as a result of that.

Despite being on Wall Street a long time I didn't have a ton of connections in venture. A lot of what venture funds were saying was “you need to raise from angels.” 

The issue with that is that the angels that would be investors in my company work at these major firms that will not allow you to invest in a competitor.

You're just stuck between a rock and a hard place. All the theoretical angels you've got access to can't give you any money. 

I started out with cold outreach to try to build relationships that, but that wasn't working. 

My space is heavily regulated. It was a chicken and egg thing for a while because investors were looking for traction and we weren't able to show any — we needed capital to gain that traction.

We went through that for close to a year in terms of periodic, undefined cold outreach. Incidentally it did end up ultimately working out with Northwestern Mutual.

It was an application process for an accelerator. I’m fortunate that I came across it in the course of doing research.

During that program, we got introduced to over 40 investors during the course of our 12 weeks there. That helped in terms of having access to more warm contacts. 

The other thing that worked was reaching out to founders. 

Instead of reaching out directly to the investors, we took a look at the portfolio of the investors we were interested in, and reached out to their portfolio founders.

If they ran a company that was similar or adjacent to what we were building, we could have a 2-for-1 conversation where you get a little bit of insight into their journey and building the company.

Some people love to put together flow charts of this thing. You reach out to a thousand investors and you get one ‘yes.’

I just never did that. I put my head down and thought that if I kept track, it would be demoralizing.

If I had to ballpark it, out of roughly 1k cold emails, 90% were non-responses.

Out of those ~100 responses — it led to ~20-25 meetings. Of those 25 meetings, 1 led to the accelerator program.

You really need to take a lot of at bats being pre-product and pre-revenue, trying to just find one person to say yes. 

Once you do get that first yes, it does get a lot easier. You can use it as currency to get more meetings.

Since that first yes, I haven’t really done much cold outreach as I’ve been able to build a network out through that accelerator — it’s made the process far smoother.

I almost always started with the context around who I was, what I had done, and why I'm positioned to do this. 

I did this because my background isn't just banking — it's also in product. 

I was at Bear Stearns when it collapsed and helped rebuild that business. 

I was at Raymond James building out their high-net-worth lending business. 

I focused on the relevant business experience that I had in terms of building or rebuilding teams.

I also emphasized the uniqueness of the product. You hear about bundling and unbundling being the ways that you add value as a startup. 

We’re going in the other direction from what a lot of startups are doing — unbundling from big banks. We’re focused on building a platform, with a multi-product first approach.

We’re really showing the synergies around being able to add more value as a cohesive platform than as a standalone point solution.

Investors know the odds are already against you, so that doesn't really help. 

You ultimately try to tell them that you’ve got a contract you want to get signed, and that there are funding requirements around that.

What has recently been helpful is showing that there are deadlines around deals; actual revenue generating opportunities that require upfront investment that has easy to understand outcomes for an investor to drive home the urgency.

We’re about to sign documents for another accelerator program that has set out their terms on the round. 

We're also talking to a lead investor who's very interested. We're transparently telling them that if they get back to us by a certain time, they can dictate the terms of that investment.

Having legitimate leverage in that sense can be helpful in driving some urgency. 

In order to get some deals closed for that partner, we need capital in order to facilitate a partnership with the bank. 

I had to learn a lot in a very short period of time. 

The biggest hurdle was learning how to code, which doesn't sound like it's relevant to fundraising, but ultimately it was because I've now had 2 co-founding CTOs drop out.

Telling investors about that adversity and saying that I learned how to code to build out the majority of the frontend of the platform myself, was intriguing. 

Now that I’m on the other side of it, it’s now maybe the biggest benefit that I have.

That's been equally the biggest challenge, but also the biggest positive outcome that I've experienced throughout all this.

You have to be relentless. To get funded, you need to be in the top 10 basis points of people trying to accomplish what you set out to achieve. 

You need to act like it — it's not going to fall into your lap. 

I'm lucky in a sense because I've been through some hardships personally that have made the hardships I’m going through as part of building this seem quaint by comparison.

You need to withstand a lot of emotional damage to get through this, especially as a first-time founder. 

You'll have to go past the point of no return multiple times before feeling like you have a decent footing. 

Within a week of that feeling, you're going to feel the same way you did right before that.

You’ve need to be able to withstand that emotional whiplash.

There are a couple of folks who have said no or not yet that I would love to continue the conversation with — I really enjoyed working with them through the due diligence process. 

I really love the team at PruVen. Rohit Ramkumar is the investor that we've been working with.

I also love the team at Headline. They've been terrific. I know the CFO from my time at a prior firm.

I also really love the team at Northwestern Mutual. They’ve been so supportive throughout the journey so far. The accelerator I mentioned earlier that we met those investors through was run by gener8tor. 

It’s an accelerator that nobody talks about, but it’s awesome. They give a $100k check and 12 straight weeks of introductions. 

They give you an uncapped amount on the valuation for a period of time, but they offer really reasonable terms for a decent check to get people going. I would recommend them to anybody. 

You don't want just good advice. You really need to understand what bad advice is too. 

There's Y Combinator’s YouTube channel. a16z has a great fintech blog.

There are other different newsletters and blogs out there too. I just encourage people to digest all of it. 

Follow everybody on Twitter, follow everybody on LinkedIn. People are going to give really bad advice. Don't take all the advice that you get. Take the advice that fits you and your situation.

Digest everything, decide what it is that's right for you, and then pick and choose amongst that universe of options out there.

If you treat it like a competitive sport, it can be fun.

In sports you need to be able to withstand getting cut from the team or maybe not being a starter.

The best athletes are the ones that have been through some adversity and have gone over the hump. 

Embrace the really difficult parts of this process because it will be difficult. If you don't embrace it, you're not going to make it.