Fundraising Playbook

Current truth

• Boundary: this page holds reusable fundraising advice and patterns. Live investor relationships, specific contacts, and round status live in investment-fundraising. The company-level fundraise posture lives in 2026-06-15-offering-pricing-fundraise.
• Stage-fit advice from oisin: for Ghostteam’s current stage, prefer a rolling SAFE angel round over a formal VC process. The near-term work is warm relationship building, not a public raise: casual coffees now, new site/rebrand before intros, then a concentrated late-August / early-September 2026 blitz if the story is ready.
• Round shape: treat $500K as the floor, $750K-$1M as comfortable, and $1-2M as possible if market appetite supports it. A $10M cap is likely inoffensive for pre-seed AI; test around $12M cap first. “2 at 20” may sound plausible if the story and use of funds support it; “1 at 20” may feel mismatched because the raise is too small for the implied ambition.
• Valuation testing: pick a price and test it on lower-priority angels before the highest-signal names. Use Carta / Crunchbase-style comps for median pre-seed and seed valuations, excluding frontier-model outliers, then decide whether Ghostteam is credibly top-quartile founder quality in a top-tier AI category.
• Pitch narrative: angels buy the founder and momentum before the product detail. Lead with second-time founder credibility, cofounder trust, bootstrapped revenue, big-name customers, and “despite X, we did Y.” Product demo supports the founder story; it should not bury the relationship/conviction pitch.
• Market story: the durable analogy is “AppTweak at the start of the App Store cycle”: no winner yet in AI-agent discoverability, Ghostteam has revenue and big-name customers without VC, and AEO / broader optimization platforms will eventually need to build or buy this capability.
• Momentum mechanics: one high-conviction lead / “giga angel” changes every later call because the previous investor pre-vets the next. Angel groups move socially and ticket sizes cluster; once one strong person says yes, name-dropping and intro chains can make the round self-propelling.
• Call and follow-up flow: build rapport first, explain why this founder/team will find a way, give the big vision/ARR anchor, then soft-close: no minimum ticket, honored to have them involved, no pressure. Follow up same day with a personal detail from the conversation, ask for 2-3 intros, and send the SAFE via DocuSign within 1-2 days of a verbal yes.
• Pre-warm strategy: get 4-5 warm relationships per founder/contact now. When ready, take one week to message everyone and book calls for the following week; if several targets are in one city, do those in person. Bridge-style intros can scale this without making Oisin write bespoke intro emails each time.
• Dilution vs team quality: stay dilution-sensitive, but do not protect an extra 2% if it prevents hiring elite people or bringing in unusually useful investors. One “giga” hire beats several merely good hires; the useful question is, “If we had $5M, would we build a different company faster?”

Open questions

• What exact raise target and cap should Ghostteam test first?
• Which lower-priority angels should be used for valuation discovery before approaching the highest-signal contacts?
• Which proof points must be live before the blitz: new website, Direct Booker lift, Monday proof, public score funnel, or the financial plan?
• Which investors count as genuine smart money/adviser value vs mainly cash?

Timeline

• [2026-07-02] (call — oisin) Oisin shared the fundraising playbook behind his recent ~$4M raise and tailored it to Ghostteam’s stage: pre-warm smart angels, wait for the new site/rebrand before intros, use a rolling SAFE, test valuation carefully, and raise enough to hire elite engineering/growth talent if the category is heating up.