What's next for PreSeed Now
What's next for PreSeed Now
We're one year old, and we're only just getting started
Hello there,
We’re taking a break from our regular programming for one edition only to take stock and look to the future, as PreSeed Now is one year old!
Read on to catch up with what we’ve done so far, and what’s next.
Want the short version? PreSeed Now is launching new features for paying subscribers:
A startup tracker to easily browse all the startups we’ve featured and get updates on their progress since we covered them
An easy intro button for when you want to get in touch with a founder directly
There’s more info on these new features below, and they’ll be rolling out to paying subscribers very soon indeed.
Want to try life as a full paying member of PreSeed Now… without paying? To mark our first anniversary, we’re giving you a two-week free trial.
Whether you’re new around here or you’ve been a free subscriber for months, upgrade today:
If you’ve been with us from the start or have only recently discovered PreSeed Now, I hope you’ll stick with us for year two.
Find out more about what what’s in store below…
– Martin.
Investors: this is for you 👇
When you invest in a startup, you need to be sure their tech–the true value behind the deal–is everything they claim it is.
PreSeed Now is sponsored by thestartupfactory.tech’s Technical Due Diligence offering
This service goes much deeper than the technology itself, taking in leadership, technology strategy, product and roadmap, people, engineering practices, and commercial analysis
The story so far…
This week one year ago we launched this newsletter to shine a light on the UK’s most interesting B2B and deep tech startups, with profile pieces that go into far more depth than very early stage startups usually receive.
It quickly turned out my hunch that there would be demand for this kind of coverage was correct.
Subscriber Maureen summed it up well on Twitter:
Other readers told us things like this:
“Your newsletter is the one I always read because it’s the only one that tells me stuff that I don’t know and covers companies before they have 7m from Sequoia or whatever”
and
“I’ve wanted to read something like this for years”
and
“I passed on a startup based when I saw their deck, but they made much more sense after I read about them in PreSeed Now, so I reached out to them after all”
Over the past year PreSeed Now has profiled 90 early-stage startups including:
A.I. voice cloning tech (before this startup became well known!)
and much more
And our profiles have an impact.
Founders tell us things like:
“One of the readers of our feature on PreSeed Now angel invested in our round!” - Keith Tsui, Medwise.ai
And
“You’ve explained my startup better than I could myself”
PreSeed Now has driven heaps of inbound attention to startups from investors, media, and prospective business partners. And at least one startup found a key hire to help push their business forward as a result of their coverage here.
The challenges we’ve faced
In many ways, PreSeed Now is a startup itself, and we’ve discovered things I didn’t expect:
When your audience is investors and founders, interest in profiles follows the rhythm of early-stage investor activity. There are few startups that want to talk to us at the height of summer or at the end of December. In year one, this led to breaks in publication at these times. This year we’ll be ready.
But at the same time, when PreSeed Now is written by one person (me!) occasional short breaks in publication are required. An important thing I learned is it takes a lot of time to do this properly. Writing and preparing each edition for publication takes about five hours. Add in conducting the interviews, doing research, and seeking out and talking to startups that might not end up being covered, and most of my time is taken up solely on the content.
So I was delighted that Samantha Deakin came on board earlier this year as head of growth to take charge of boosting the business side of things, including marketing and subscriber growth. We’re already finding ways our current publishing setup limits what might work best for our paying members, and we’re evolving our approach to everything quickly. It feels good!
So… what’s next?
Year two at PreSeed Now is all about:
Profiling lots more early-stage startups
Launching more benefits for paying members
Having listened to what our readers want, the first two new features we’re launching are:
The PreSeed Now Startup Tracker
We’ve built the PreSeed Now Startup Tracker, letting you:
Explore all the early-stage startups we’ve covered
See key details about them all at a glance
Find out what has happened since we covered them - we’ll be adding updates to the tracker regularly that won’t appear in the newsletter
The tracker will tell you:
Which startup closed its £1 million seed round but is still raising
Which startup closed a £1.5 million round in March
Which startup closed an oversubscribed £330,000 pre-seed round and is already planning a £2 million to 5 million seed round
…and lots more
The tracker is currently live in beta with a small number of paying members.
Easy intro button
Many PreSeed Now readers want to reach out to the founders we feature, and a new feature will make this simple.
Powered by tech from ace Irish startup Bridge, our new button will allow you to introduce yourself to founders directly, without needing their email address or getting lost in their LinkedIn notifications. They can then respond if they’d like to talk, opening up a normal email conversation.
How to get these features
We’ll be introducing the Startup Tracker and easy intro links very soon.
To get access, just sign up as a paying subscriber - right now we’re even offering two weeks free:
We’d like to add a handful of additional beta testers for the Tracker before we roll it out fully. If you’d like to become a beta tester and you’re already a paying member, just hit reply to this email and let me know!
Back on Thursday
PreSeed Now will be back in your inbox on Thursday, with our 91st startup profile. And there are plenty more where that came from.