A roadmap to raise, in four parts.
Intake, The R.E.A.D., Roadmap to Raise, and Roadshow to Raise. The first three get a founder ready. The fourth runs the raise.
Intake: the diagnostic call
Contact me through the form and I'll send you a link to a short set of questions, answered by voice. People say more when they speak, and less of it is rehearsed. Your answers tell me whether this conversation comes at the right moment.
Then we talk for forty-five minutes. I'll have read your answers, looked at your site, and gone through your deck if you sent one. You don't need to.
What you're building. What you want from this raise. And which direction makes sense for your company right now, whether that's institutional capital, angels, blended finance, or that you're not ready yet and something else has to happen first.
The call ends either with a reason not to proceed, or with the R.E.A.D. as the next step.
The R.E.A.D.
Raise. Evidence. Architecture. Divergence.
Raise
The round, the reasoning behind the number in your own words, what you think stands between you and funding, and what raising is intended to solve.
Evidence
An inventory of everything an investor needs. Deck, numbers, market claims, financial model, data room, how the team reads on paper, and what the investors who passed actually said. Can every number be traced back to where it came from, and does the same figure appear the same way everywhere. Every document gets read against the others, so a contradiction between the deck and the model surfaces here instead of in due diligence.
Architecture
How you build, how you decide, and what happens to you under pressure. Your inner architecture.
Divergence
Where those three aren't congruent. That gap is the finding, and it's rarely inside any one of them on its own.
The user count in the deck doesn't match the model.
You're raising five million and can't say why five.
The story bends toward whoever spoke last.
You leave with what's working, what's off, what's underneath it, and which of the gaps to close first.
Roadmap to Raise
The first read of your deck is increasingly done by an AI tool, screened before a partner ever opens it. A model can read the paper; it can't read the person. What decides it is the founder.
The dynamics of raising stay largely unseen, to founders and to funders. The Roadmap to Raise is where the foundations get built, and it starts with understanding what usually goes unnoticed.
If you try to act like something you're not, you'll end up in an uncanny valley.
Paul Graham · Y Combinator
A capital raise is the most exposing thing a founder does. There is no boss, the outcome is public, the rejection is personal, and the whole company's future rides on how a founder holds themselves through a handful of conversations. Whatever pattern someone carries, worthiness or avoidance or defensiveness, the raise turns the pressure up until it shows.
That's what makes it both exhilarating and painful. The patterns become visible, and there's a deadline.
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.
C.G. Jung · Aion
Congruence is whether the story, the numbers and the person say the same thing when someone starts pulling at them. The READ shows where they don't, and closing those gaps is the work here, the same way a shipbuilder runs a hand along every seam before she goes waterborne.
What runs on the outside: positioning, storytelling and the deck. Financial model and valuation logic through a specialist. A data room built to what investors ask for. Investor maps, warm contacts, and what makes each investor tick. Delivered with selected partners.
What the READ turned up decides where the work goes, so no two founders get the same programme.
The Best Match works with a set of AI tools as part of the practice, built by Super Stories, in conversation: an Amsterdam based B2B strategy and communications agency and the AI development partner for The Best Match. Dedicated tools carry the volume work, and the hours that frees go to the part no system does: the read on you, and the investor conversations.
At seed you have no board that will tell you where your reasoning breaks. This is one, calibrated to your company and your raise in a real intake conversation, so what comes back is about your business rather than business in general. Take a decision to it and you get the objection a VC would raise, and the different one a family office would raise, before the meeting where either costs you. Take a number to it and it asks where the number came from, and says so when the answer is nowhere. And it's there at eleven at night instead of waiting for the next call.
Journaling is what people who make hard decisions have always done. This is the spoken version: designed questions instead of a blank page, a few minutes a day, and your own words back without a reframe. During a raise the story bends toward whoever spoke last, and this is the record that shows when it does. It's also what the roadshow gate runs on: your language in week one next to your language now.
A retainer that runs until you're ready for the roadshow, or until I tell you the raise should wait.
Roadshow to Raise
You only get one first meeting with each investor, so the roadshow starts when three things are true.
Every number in the deck can be traced without being asked.
A practice investor call runs through without you looking for reassurance halfway.
The recordings from the start and from now show a difference we can both name.
Warm paths come first. I map which advisors, team members, and investors have a bridge to each target: a shared board seat, a co-investment, or overlapping history. They get briefed, given what they need, and followed up until they answer.
Alongside it, new outreach. Fifty investors per wave. Angels, VCs, family offices, sequenced to where you are. Each one checked on five things: stage, sector, geography, portfolio fit, and whether they're still deploying. The decision-maker identified inside the firm. Email from a shared address on your own domain, with deliverability handled underneath. LinkedIn where there's no address.
Before each investor call, a brief on who you're meeting and how they decide. Afterwards, my read on how you came across and where you shifted.
Weekly calls. One wave runs while the next is built. Materials get updated the day traction changes.
Non-dilutive funding
European, national and regional schemes fund deep-tech, cleantech, health and aerospace without taking equity. Establishing which ones apply takes research time nobody raising a round has.
Fund Finder reads those schemes against what your company does and returns a shortlist worth pursuing. It's part of the tooling built by Super Stories.
Qualified at intake, run alongside the equity route.
What the work asks
- Trust in the read
At least far enough to act on it once.
- That you walk the distance
The lists, the briefs, the materials and the follow-ups come off your plate. The investor calls stay yours.
- Response time
Answers within a day, because investor interest cools over a week of silence.
- Willingness to look at yourself
If what you want is the lists and the outreach on their own, this is the wrong engagement.
Not included
A raise can't be guaranteed, and I won't take on an engagement structured as though it could be. What I stand behind is the read, the work, and the introductions I make in my own name.
Legal advice.
Paid introductions. Nobody on your list is paid to introduce you, and I take no fee for making one.
The inner work here is aimed at the raise. If something surfaces that belongs somewhere else, I'll say so.
Start with a conversation. Forty-five minutes, free, and you'll know where you stand.
Book the intakeOr listen first. The Human Side of Building is a series of conversations with founders and investors about what decides a raise.
Getting a founder ready to raise capital, and then running the investor roadshow alongside them.