A founder raising a round books intro calls with VCs and family offices

You are raising money. Maybe a seed or Series A round for your company, maybe a fund of your own. Warm introductions are still the best door, but there are never enough of them, and most founders run out of names long before they run out of runway. This use case builds a list of partners at venture funds and family offices that invest at your stage, opens every email with something true about what that investor backs, and turns the replies into intro calls.

One thing before you start. Writing to investors about a raise can fall under securities rules, depending on your country, the type of round and how you raise it. Check with your counsel what applies to yours before the first email goes out.

Step 1. Write the sentence first

Write the investor you want in one sentence. Ours is this. "Partners and investment directors at US venture funds and family offices that write seed and early stage checks." If you know your sector, add it to the sentence and to the keywords below. A fund that does not invest at your stage will not say yes, however good the email is.

Step 2. Set the filters

Open Search, then People, and set these. Read the count after each one.

Add your sector to the keywords if you have one, for example fintech or vertical SaaS. It shrinks the count, and every person left is a better fit.

Open this search in Argorant

Step 3. Read the count, then twenty rows

For this sentence, expect a count in the low thousands for the whole country, less once you add a sector. That is a small market, so treat every row as a person, not a number.

• Above 10,000 means the keywords did not apply, or you added a third industry. Take it out.
• 1,000 to 5,000 is the working range. Plan a first wave of about 1,500 people.
• Under 300 usually means the sector keyword is too narrow. Use a broader word, like software instead of a product category.

Then scroll twenty rows. You will see several partners from the same fund. Write to one or two per fund, not all five. After you save the list in the next step, open it under Lists, tick the extra partners and press Remove from list. Five partners getting the same email from you is the fastest way to be remembered for the wrong reason.

Step 4. Save the list, keep only valid emails

Click Select matching, choose how many people you want, then Save list. Name it so you know what it is in three months, for example US - VC and family offices - seed - partners. A saved list keeps the filters, so next quarter it shows the market as it is then.

When you attach the list to the campaign, choose Valid under which emails to include and nothing else. Funds are small teams on their own domains. A bounce from a small domain hurts more than usual, so do not risk catch-all addresses here. Each person from search costs 1 credit, unless you already unlocked them before.

Step 5. Add the line about their focus

Investors read a lot of cold email, and they can tell in one line whether you looked at them at all. So the first sentence is about what this investor says they back, taken from their own website, or a company in their portfolio that is close to yours. It goes into a variable, {{custom_focus}}, with a fallback for every fund where you found nothing specific.

There are two ways to fill it.

• From a file. Export the list, add a column called custom_focus, write one line per fund from its website, and upload it to the campaign with Upload CSV. Columns you keep as custom fields become variables with the same name.
• From Claude or ChatGPT. Connected to Argorant, your assistant reads each fund's website and portfolio page, writes the line, shows you five examples with the source first and saves the rest when you agree. If a site says nothing clear, it keeps the fallback rather than guessing.

For my campaign "Demo: Seed round investors", set up a personal line called custom_focus.
It says what this investor backs, from their own website or portfolio page,
as a phrase that fits after "I read that", 8 to 16 words,
e.g. "you led the seed in a freight billing startup last year".
Fallback: "you back early teams in B2B software".
Show me five examples with the source first. Never name a portfolio company you did not see on their site.

Step 6. Write the three emails

Press New campaign on the Campaigns page, name it, attach the list and go to Emails. Replace our example company with yours, and only put numbers in the email that you can show on the call.

Why them, what you do, what you have, one small ask. The choice between a call and the deck lets a busy partner say yes to the easier one.

One new fact that matters to an investor, here how customers find you. Not a bump.

A clean exit. A short no from an investor is worth having, and the question about a colleague often finds the partner who covers your space.

Press View preview before you go on. With no leads yet, it fills every variable with your own details, which shows each fallback in place. Read the fallback sentence out loud. "I read that you back early teams in B2B software" is fine for a fund whose site says little.

Step 7. Mailboxes for 1,500 people in 4 weeks

Cold email never goes out from your main domain. It goes out from separate mailboxes on domains that look like yours, for example a short variation of your brand name. If one of them gets tired, you retire it and your real domain never notices.

Here is the math for this campaign. 1,500 people over 4 weeks is about 75 new people per weekday. Each gets three emails, so once the follow-ups overlap you send roughly 225 emails a day. At 5 cold emails per mailbox per day, that is about 45 mailboxes.

There are two ways to get there. Under Outreach, Inboxes you connect mailboxes you already have, from Google, Microsoft or any other provider. Or you have new Microsoft 365 mailboxes set up on new domains. Those come in bundles from 100 mailboxes, you do not need a plan to buy them, and they connect to your campaigns on their own. 100 mailboxes carry 500 cold emails a day, which leaves room for a second campaign.

New mailboxes wait at least 24 hours before they send anything. Warm-up is included and starts switched off. Switch it on for new mailboxes and give them one to two weeks before full volume. Never raise the limit per mailbox to go faster. More mailboxes is the right lever.

For a raise, name the sending domains after your company, not after a generic brand. An investor who replies will look you up, and the domain should lead straight back to you.

Step 8. Schedule and launch

In the Senders step of the wizard, every connected mailbox is ticked. Untick the ones that belong to other campaigns or brands. Sends rotate across the ones you keep, and each one still respects its own daily limit.

In the Schedule step, set the timezone of the people you write to, here US Eastern (ET), not your own. Keep the sending window at 09:00 to 17:00, keep Skip weekends on and keep the gap between sends per mailbox at 60 to 120 minutes. Plain text stays on, so the email looks like it came from a person and carries no tracking pixel.

The last step is the review. Read it as if somebody else built the campaign. The audience with the grades you picked, the sequence with its waits, the senders, the start and the pace. Then press Launch campaign. Launch is not possible without senders and leads, and mailboxes still in their first day hold the launch until they are ready. Afterwards, open the Settings tab and check that Stop on reply and Bounce protection are on. Bounce protection pauses the campaign when more than 10% bounce once 100 people have been contacted.

Step 9. Replies and booked calls

Every reply lands in the Unibox, from every mailbox and campaign, and gets a label on its own. The standard labels are Interested, Meeting request, Out of office, Unsubscribe and Other. Switch on Referral and Wrong person in the settings as well. On our own largest campaign, one in four human replies pointed us to a colleague, more often than a straight yes.

A yes gets answered by the campaign itself, with a subsequence. It starts when a reply contains one of your keywords, takes the person out of the main sequence and answers in the same thread in the next sending window. A reply that says "not interested" or asks you to stop never triggers one.

Open the campaign's Subsequences tab, press Add subsequence and use these keywords. interested, send the deck, send deck, happy to chat, intro call, tell me more. Then write the first email.

Promise the deck in a separate email so it is easy to forward to the partnership, and offer two concrete times.

Send the deck yourself, from the Unibox, right after. A subsequence answers the first yes in minutes. The deck, the data room and every question after that are yours, and investors notice how fast and how well you answer them.

Every morning, filter the Unibox by Meeting request and Interested. Those are the conversations one answer away from a call. Propose a specific time instead of just a link, and add your booking link as the second option. When the call is set, change the label to Meeting booked so your numbers count it. Answer referrals the same day. Thank them, write to the person they named, and mention who sent you.

If you would rather work from Claude or ChatGPT, your assistant can read the Unibox, sort replies by label and draft answers. Nothing is sent until you confirm. The use case Run it all from Claude or ChatGPT shows how.

What to expect

The ranges below come from our own sending, scaled to 1,500 people. Our healthy campaign, two emails to a valid-only list from mailboxes at 5 cold emails a day, got human replies from 1.3% of the people contacted. Campaigns from overworked mailboxes sat at 0.3%. About one in five human replies says yes, and about one in four points you to a colleague. These are reference points, not promises. Your offer, your segment and your copy move them a lot. The reply rate in Argorant also counts out-of-office notes, so it reads higher. Compare these numbers with the reply rate excl. OOO.

Investor replies are short, and many say "not our stage" or "not our sector". Count those as useful, because they tell you to fix the list, not the email. A request for the deck counts as interested. For a raise, two or three good first calls from one wave is a fair result, and the second wave goes better once you know which kind of fund answered.

On the calendar it looks like this. The first replies arrive in week one, 65% of all replies come within an hour of the email landing and 84% answer the first email. After 4 weeks everyone has had the full sequence, and a week later nearly everything that will come is in. If human replies stay near zero after a few hundred people, check delivery first and copy second.

Do the same from Claude or ChatGPT

Every step above also works as a conversation, once Argorant is connected to your assistant. This is the request that builds the list. Your assistant counts, shows sample rows and asks before it spends a credit.

The full setup, from connecting the assistant to launching and handling replies, is in Run it all from Claude or ChatGPT.