It's a good time to see the resilience of founders and their abilities to pivot, weather the storm, or rethink how they’re doing things.

When COVID happened, it blew up our idea because people simply couldn’t meet up in person anymore. However, because I still believed in our mission and vision, We decided to pivot and turn our idea into a video-first community platform.

If it was not for DocSend, we wouldn’t have been able to complete our pre-seed raise in such a small time frame. Using specific links to track document analytics helped us focus our energy on reaching back out to the right investors who were actually interested.

Not only have we seen investors shift their focus toward greater efficiency, but a brighter spotlight has also been shone on the importance of high-quality, compelling pitch decks.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about fundraising is one I learned quickly during this last round: investors want to see more than good numbers. Compared to a seed round, investors are looking for more documents, proof of traction, and a compelling pitch deck in a Series A.

Read our Q&A with Flo Crivello, founder and CEO of Teamflow, on how he was able to run an efficient seed round fundraising process using DocSend.

Esther Crawford, co-founder and CEO of Squad, shares her story of building and growing her startup for four years then choosing to sell it to Twitter instead of raising a Series A.

We did a little investigating into the decks that came into the DocSend Fundraising Network during Q3. Let’s find out a little bit more about what kinds of teams have been raising money, where they’re from, and what kinds of spaces they’re innovating in.