If you ever feel like you are not ready to talk to me about your startup, please refer to my first ‘mockup’ for my own company’s website.

Legitimately helpful resources

About this compilation

You have most likely come to this page because of a recent pitch meeting we’ve had but, in case we haven’t spoken directly, hi - I’m Sarah Willson 😊 I have compiled the below resources and insights from my experience as a founder, and more recently from my experience working at Panache Ventures - an $100M pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm investing in early-stage Canadian tech companies. This list, rather than exhaustive, is a compilation of only the most helpful resources I have come across over the last few years I have spent in the startup ecosystem. I hope you find them as useful as I have.

  • VC Common Terms and Phrases

  • Founder Institute’s list of resources for founders in KW here

  • For understanding + connecting with VC’s

    • Read

      • Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

      • For staying up to date on tech news/ fundraising rounds

      • Project Drawdown for furthering subject matter expertise in climate

      • For Understanding what goes into an investment memo (aka how a VC may be evaluating and talking about your company)

        • Read Bessemer’s public investment memo’s here

      • Understanding SAFEs and Priced Equity Rounds

    • Connect

      • List of 90 venture capital funds that lead seed rounds with $500k+ cheques (credit: Hassan Awada)

      • List of venture capital funds focussed on supporting underrepresented founders

      • For climate companies

        • CTVC for a great list of relevant VC firms

  • For benchmarking your SaaS company: https://www.capchase.com/lp/benchmark-report-2023

  • For acquiring early customers / users:

    • Gabriel Weinberg’s book: Traction

      • When I first started my company, Hive Sitters, I found this book super helpful. In the book, Gabriel identifies 19 “Channels for Traction” and an exercise called the Bullseye Marketing Framework where founders can experiment with each of these channels, filter out those that aren’t currently feasible, and design experiments for testing a core few strategies.

      • When I first started Hive, I was convinced that the best way to acquire customers was to hand out physical flyers to parents.. I spent an entire 3 weeks walking all over Toronto and putting flyers in the mailboxes of any home that had an indication that a child lived there (chalk on the driveway, stroller on the porch, etc.). This approach yielded me next to no customers and took a ton of time. Someone recommended Traction to me and I found the above exercise to be transformative for my business, allowing me to mitigate my biases about the most effective acquisition strategies. If you don’t want to go digging through the whole book for the exercises/ channels, you can check out a summary of each below: