“Three weeks in. Inbox is winning. Comms eating my whole week.”
Founder, Series A
You shouldn’t be the one typing investor updates at 11pm. There’s a version of the next four weeks where the inbox, the CRM, and the update cadence run themselves — and you spend your hours where they actually move the round.
What we deploy in week one
Two senior partners. No discovery deck. We sit with you for an hour, watch where the day leaks, and pick the two or three pieces of the comms stack that are eating the most time. Usually that’s the same three things: updates, inbox triage, and CRM hygiene.
- Investor-update drafts queued from your existing notes, metrics, and prior updates. You edit and send; you don’t write from a blank page.
- Inbox triage with a daily digest: ten things only you can answer, everything else handled or parked. You stop opening email to find out what needs you.
- CRM hygiene running quietly in the background — contact records updated, follow-up dates set, stage changes logged. No new tool to learn.
What we deliberately don’t touch
A raise is a bad time to rebuild your tooling. We don’t go near the data room, your cap table, your legal documents, or anything that goes to investors without an explicit second sign-off from you. We don’t introduce new software you’ll need to maintain after we leave. And we don’t automate anything that requires judgment you haven’t yet encoded — decisions about which lead to prioritize, how to respond to a term sheet question, when to follow up with a specific partner. Those stay with you.
The goal is a shorter week, not a more complicated one. If a piece of automation would require you to babysit it during a raise, we leave it for later.
What week one looks like
Day one is a working session, not a kickoff meeting. We look at your actual inbox, your actual update cadence, and your actual CRM state. By end of week one you have a draft queue that works, a triage setup that cuts your open-email time in half, and a clear picture of what’s running and what you’re still owning manually.
Nothing goes out without your approval. Every draft, every flagged reply, every CRM update sits in a review step. The agents surface work; you decide what ships.
What success looks like during a raise
Not a dashboard. Not a metric. Fewer hours lost to the inbox each day. Investor updates that go out on time without a Sunday sprint. A CRM that reflects reality instead of lagging two weeks behind. And the ability to close your laptop at a reasonable hour knowing the comms side is handled.
When the round closes, we hand over the prompts, the scripts, and a short playbook your ops hire can run on their own. You keep the system. The engagement ends when it should.
Questions
- Who has access to my inbox and investor data?
- Only the two of us — the founders who take your call and run your engagement. We don't use shared tools, offshore staff, or third-party AI services that train on your data. Everything we build runs in your environment, under credentials you control and can revoke at any time.
- What happens if an agent makes a mistake?
- Nothing goes out without a human review step. Every investor update draft, every CRM entry, every outbound reply sits in a queue for you to approve, edit, or discard. An agent breaking means a draft doesn't appear — not that something wrong gets sent. We design for graceful failure from day one.
- What does this cost?
- We scope week one on the call. Most raise-focused engagements run as a short fixed project — a few weeks, a clear deliverable, a handoff playbook. We'll tell you the number before you decide anything. There's no retainer unless you want one after the round closes.
- When does this stop being useful?
- When the round closes and comms volume drops back to baseline. We plan for that. The handoff playbook is written so an ops hire or a co-founder can run the same system on their own. You're not buying a dependency — you're buying a working system you keep.
- Will I have to learn new tools?
- No. We work inside whatever you already use — Gmail, Notion, Airtable, a spreadsheet, whatever. A raise is a bad time to onboard new software. The point is to subtract from your week, not add a project.
- How quickly can this actually start?
- The 20-minute call is enough to know whether we're a fit and what the first two weeks should look like. If we move forward, most engagements are running within a week. We don't have a discovery phase — we sit with you, watch where the day leaks, and start there.