I invested $10,000 in Verustruct last fall. $500,000 more came from my intros. Lesson: use your first investors to get more investors…

How My $10,000 Helped Close Another $500,000

Last September, I invested $10,000 in a startup called Verustruct. Founder Nick Callegari is 3D printing houses out of concrete to solve the housing crisis.

Then, I fired off a bunch of intros to investors.

Some of the investors I introduced Nick to wrote a check. They also introduced him to more investors.

The chain reaction I started led to Nick closing around $500,000 for his pre-seed round. He explains how the whole thing went down on a recent interview with OpenVC.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Investors 

If you have even one tiny investor, ask him to introduce you to more investors.

Give him a very short blurb he can use. Include a brief deck, no more than 10 slides.

Ask for intros to specific people in his network. Look through his X and LinkedIn and see who he knows.

Tell him to include any other investors he thinks would be a good match.

If you make it super easy for your investors to do intros for you, you’ll get more of them.

How $500,000 Could Become Millions

That $500,000 I introduced Nick to? That’s not the end, not by a longshot. 

Several of the VC’s I introduced him to are considering term sheets for their much larger seed round. In time, my intros may yield many millions. 

When your investors make intros for you, those intros keep paying off. 

What Do You Have to Lose?

Until I read Nick’s interview yesterday, I had no idea what my intros had led to!

It took me about 30 minutes to send the necessary emails. That’s $1,000,000 an hour. 

I definitely can’t promise this for every founder. 

The credit goes to Nick. He did an amazing job of closing the people I introduced him to!

There’s no guarantee your investors can help you. But don’t you have a better shot trying this than sending another cold message?

What Made Me Believe in Nick?

Why did I invest in Nick, anyway?

This was a founder bet. Nick led the team of engineers at SpaceX that built the extravehicular assembly for the Dragon spacecraft. 

This enabled the world’s first commercial spacewalk. Had he failed, those astronauts would’ve died. 

He did not fail.

My logic: if he can do that, 3D printing a house should be easy. 

I shared this very basic thesis with Nick on our first meeting. 

“That’s what we’re hoping for,” he said. 

Humble guy!

Wrap-Up

I don’t care if you only have one investor that put in $1,000. Milk that guy for all he’s worth!

Making intros will only take him a few minutes. The ROI can be huge.

If you’re raising money right now, go through every investor on your cap table and find out what intros they can make.

This could be the key to closing your round.

More on tech:

Meet My Latest Investment: Verustruct

Small Investors Lead to Big Investors

Why Some Founders Raise Millions with a Text — And Others Can’t Get a Single Check: Traction vs. Track Record

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