It is amazing to see how AI continues to help make old processes faster and more efficient across many use cases. One area I see a lot of AI/automated outreach is to investors. One one hand, this can allow you to quickly send out messages to hundreds or thousands of investors. On the other hand, your message can easily be lost in the noise of numerous other founders doing the same thing.

Reach out to as many investors as possible

As a founder, time spent building your business is far more valuable than time spent talking to investors. Being able to leverage AI to quickly find a target list of investors, draft messages, and pull in relevant information can make sending a message to numerous investors feasible. You can then monitor who views the message, looks at a pitch deck, who responds, etc. If you are trying to reach as many investors as possible, this could be a good path as you gain scale in quantity at the expense of quality.

Focused messages to a few investors that you want

In this approach you leverage AI to find likely best fit investors, go deeper into the research on specific firms/investors, find intros, and craft more thoughtful messages to a smaller number of investors you feel would be a good fit.  This approach can help you stand out from the numerous other cold outreach emails that come to an investor, but the quality focus comes at a tradeoff of quantity.

Entrepreneurs can be successful in both paths, but I’m curious which one do you prefer?

For me, 95%+ of email, web form, and LI messages look something like this below:  

Hi A,

Do you invest in [ABC] industry?

We are raising $XM for [XYZ] company to do ….

When is a good time to chat?

-Founder

The above has zero personalization or thought, no research on what our firm invests in, and is unlikely to break through the noise.  I much prefer a cold outreach that spends just a few minutes to write something focused, relevant, and thoughtful. Founders and investors partnering together is still about the relationship first.