What happens after the raise
When we closed our first funding round, I thought I'd feel relieved. Instead, I just felt exhausted. Until the wire actually hit our bank account, part of me wasn't convinced it was going to happen.
And then a new feeling kicked in:
Okay... now we actually have to build something worthy of this money.
Nobody really prepares you for that feeling. Everyone talks about how hard fundraising is. Very few people talk about what happens the week after.
We had been in survival mode and didn't even know it
Before the raise, we were just paying bills. Getting an advertiser here and there. Keeping the lights on. We weren't planning long term because we couldn't afford to think past next month.
Then we raised, and suddenly we had board meetings, quarterly goals and huge expectations.
My co-founder and I sat down for a full strategy and vision day and it felt like starting from scratch. We had to ask ourselves questions we'd never had the luxury of asking before. Not "how do we make payroll" but "what are we actually building and where is it going in three years?"
Suddenly, your company feels real
Before the raise, Frich still felt like an early stage startup. After, it felt like a business overnight. I was setting up Gusto for payroll, organizing contracts, opening a CD so our cash was actually compounding. None of it was on my radar six months earlier.
One of the first things we did was get the team set up on T-Mobile for Business. It sounds small but when you're going from two people to an actual team, everyone needs reliable service and you need it on a real business plan, not a patchwork of personal accounts. It was one of those moves where I felt like “okay, we're actually running a company now”.
Customer.io went from a tool we barely noticed to one of our biggest expenses. I went from thinking about sales and growth to spending half my time on things I never expected to be spending time on.
Our head of growth quit after three months
She told me on a call, completely out of the blue. I didn't see it coming at all.
She said she felt lonely. Working remotely, she never really felt like part of the team.
That was really something that made me think. Not just because losing your head of growth three months in is painful for the business, but because it made me realize we had been careless. We'd been so focused on hiring after the raise that we forgot to think about what it actually feels like to join a company remotely and alone.
In the beginning, culture happened naturally. Everyone was in the same room - we all wore Frich merch and worked non-stop together. But when you start hiring remotely, new people don't feel that.
After she left, I realized every new employee needs to be brought into the mission from day one. You can't assume people will absorb the culture through Slack messages. You have to repeat the why. You have to make them feel like they're building something with you, not just working for you.
If I raised again tomorrow, this is what I’d do
- Have a strategy and vision day with my co-founder before the raise closes, not after - so you’re immediately ready to execute as the round closes
- Set up a CD so your raise is compounding from day one instead of sitting in a checking account. At current rates you can earn over 4% APY, which on a $2.8M raise is over $100K in a year doing nothing
- Get on Gusto, set up T-Mobile for Business for the team, organize your contracts. Don't wait until things get messy
- Set monthly and quarterly goals so you're not just reacting to whatever's in front of you
- Build company culture intentionally. Don't expect new hires to feel the same way as the people you hired on day one
- Have a real onboarding process. A Slack invite and a Google Drive link is not onboarding
Raising money feels like the finish line when you're in the middle of it. In reality, it's just the moment the real work begins. Hopefully these lessons help to make the post-raise transition to build.
