SeedLegals & Spice Startups announce Seed Sprint

SeedLegals and Spice Startups are calling for actively raising pre-seed and seed founders to join a free-to-access 4-week sprint intended to transform their startup into investable businesses.

The sprint is designed for all startups that don’t have a network for warm intros, are unsure how to capture investors’ attention, are struggling to get a follow up meeting, or just want to spend a month focusing on nailing their fundraise.

Seed Sprint will be centred around two fundamental attributes of successful startups, accountability, and growth. Increasingly (thanks, in part, to YCombinator), investors want to see week-on-week growth, and founders who can demonstrate their ability to execute on their vision and game plan (YC suggest 5-7% growth per week as ‘good’ and 10% as ‘exceptional’)

We will support you to generate and demonstrate this growth, with 4 focus weeks, designed to strengthen the metrics around different elements of your proposition, from product-market fit, engagement metrics, customer acquisition, and ‘revenue ability’. Each week, we’ll ask founders to send metric updates, and at the end of the focus weeks, you’ll have a month of week-on-week growth data to show investors.

Investor engagement

In addition to giving you the best insider tips to master investor outreach, founders will have plenty of opportunities during Seed Sprint to get in front of investors. Each week, we’re welcoming a ‘been there, done that’ speaker, and each speaker is (you guessed it) also an investor. For all founders that complete the sprint and have their week-on-week growth data, we’ll also be sending out your company details and metrics updates to our network of 50+ angels and early stage VCs. Not only that, for the founders that demonstrate the most growth, there’s an opportunity to meet 15+ investors for 1:1 meetings and present at our final Demo Day.

A bit of healthy competition

We believe that accountability to deadlines and to a group of peers will expedite your outreach and growth, and so during the sprint, you won’t be alone. You’ll join a cohort of similar-stage founders who will all be submitting weekly metrics together. As mentioned, the startups that have demonstrated the most growth will be invited to join our Angel / Founder Speed Networking event, and a Pitch event, to get in front of even more investors.

Been there, done that founders and investors

By now you must be thinking ‘this sounds great, but how do we know what investors really care about, and what metrics can you feasibly grow in just 5 days?’ For this, we’ve lined up a fantastic panel of speakers that will kick start each week with their top tips and tricks, so you can hit the ground running, including,

Richard Howard. Founder-turned-angel, Richard is an active investor in early stage startups including Eola, Reallm, Dispatch and Cachet. Alongside angel investing he works with startups every day at AWS, and is responsible for growing AWS's market presence amongst the startup community. Richard will be talking about what metrics he wants to see as an angel, and top tips for getting those all important users.

Ross Sheil. Ross is also an active angel investor, investing in startups pre-seed. He is particularly interested in startups that have demonstrable engagement metrics. Ross himself has been responsible for these metrics, at Twitter, and now at Stripe, where he was the first global hire, responsible for Stripe's go-to-market startup strategy. Ross will be sharing his tips and tricks for customer acquisition, and how to win over his trust with your engagement metrics.

Dr Louise Rix, Louise is an Investor at Forward Partners. After going through EF, and a stint in medicine, Louise turned her hand to investing. She now sits on the board of several startups, and will be helping our founders master their investor outreach strategy.

Anthony Rose. Founder, SeedLegals. Serial founder Anthony Rose has definitely ‘been there, done that’. He speaks from experience about fundraising and metrics, having built SeedLegals (now Series A), a platform that is trusted by over 20,000 UK startups and investors.

We’ll also be welcoming other investor partners, for hands on mentoring and support, including Eva Tarasova, Angel Investor and Investment Director at Family Office Wharton Asset Management, Pearse Coyle, Investor at Deep Tech Seed Fund, and Dr Daniela Duca, Senior Product Manager at Sage Publishing.

Find out more and register for the sprint here.