I spend a meaningful portion of every week reviewing inbound pitches from growth-stage founders. Some of them are exceptional. Most are not, but not because the companies are bad — often because the pitch does not communicate what makes the company compelling in the way it needs to be communicated to capture our attention in the first 90 seconds. After years of evaluating hundreds of companies across the growth stage, I want to offer something genuinely useful: a direct, honest account of what works and what does not when approaching BeMoreeDriven Capital.

This is not a generic guide to fundraising. There are many excellent resources for that. This is specifically about how to get a meeting with us, what that meeting looks like, and what happens after it if we decide to engage. The goal is to save both parties time and to surface the companies we should be talking to that might otherwise fall through the cracks of a busy inbound process.

Cold Inbound vs. Warm Introduction: The Reality

Let us address this directly. Warm introductions convert to first meetings at a significantly higher rate than cold inbound. This is not because we are snobbish about the sourcing channel — it is because a warm introduction from someone we trust is itself a signal about the quality of the company. The person making the introduction has done a first-order screen and has put their own reputation on the line by referring the founder.

That said, we do read cold inbound, and we have made investments that originated as cold emails. The conversion rate is lower, but it is not zero. If you do not have a path to a warm introduction, do not let that stop you. Write a great cold email instead.

For a warm introduction: the most useful intros come from founders in our portfolio, from co-investors we have worked with, and from domain experts in the industries we focus on. If you know any of these people and have a genuine relationship with them, ask for an introduction rather than using them as a loose reference on a cold email. The difference matters.

The Anatomy of a Great First Email

Whether cold or warm, the initial communication is doing one job: it needs to make us want to have a conversation. It does not need to tell us everything about your company. It needs to tell us the three things that will make us open a calendar.

The three-minute filter we apply to every initial communication is straightforward: market size, revenue quality, and gross margin. Not because these are the only things that matter — they are not — but because these three data points tell us immediately whether a company is in our investment universe. A company in a niche $200M market is not a fit regardless of its other characteristics. A company with NRR below 100% is not a fit. A company with gross margins below 65% in a software business is not a fit without a very clear explanation of why margins will improve and on what timeline.

A great first email includes the following elements, in roughly this order:

  1. One sentence on what the company does. Not what it is building toward, not the vision — what it does today. Be specific: "We automate compliance documentation workflows for mid-market financial services firms" is more useful than "We are building the future of regulatory compliance."
  2. The market you are in. Not the total addressable market figure from your deck (we will verify this ourselves) but the specific customer segment you have penetrated. "We serve 34 financial institutions with $2B–$15B in assets under management, primarily in the United States."
  3. Your ARR and NRR. If you are in our stage range ($8M–$80M ARR) and your NRR is above 120%, lead with both numbers. These two data points do more work than any other combination of metrics to establish that you belong in a conversation with us.
  4. Your gross margin. One sentence. "Our gross margins are 78% on a fully-loaded basis." If your margins are below 70%, provide a brief explanation: "Our gross margins are currently 64% due to a services component that we are systematically migrating to product delivery."
  5. Why you are reaching out now. We are more receptive to founders who are proactively managing their capital timeline — "We are targeting a Series B in Q3 2025 and are beginning conversations with institutional growth investors" — than to founders who appear to be shopping a round under distress.

What the email should not include: a 12-slide deck as the first attachment, an NDA request, a list of 15 metrics without context, or language about being "the Salesforce of X" or "AI-powered." The former creates friction. The latter signals that the founder is pitching from a template rather than thinking clearly about what differentiates their company.

What the First Meeting Looks Like

If your initial communication passes our three-minute filter, we will typically schedule a 45-minute introductory call within one to two weeks. The goal of this call is to establish whether we should progress to a deeper engagement — not to convince us to invest. Managing that expectation will make the conversation more productive.

We come to first meetings having done basic preparatory research: we have looked at the company's website, reviewed any publicly available information about the business, and in some cases spoken briefly with people in our network who know the space. We are not looking to be educated on basics. We want to go deep on the things that the preparatory research does not answer.

The five questions we ask in virtually every first meeting:

  1. What is the mechanism of your net revenue retention? We do not want the aggregate NRR number — we already have that. We want to understand what drives it. Is it seat expansion? Usage growth? Cross-sell? Price increase? The answer tells us whether the NRR is durable and whether it will sustain as the company scales.
  2. Describe your most competitive deal in the last 12 months. How the founder talks about competition is revealing. Founders who are dismissive of competitors or who claim they have no real competition are either in a market too niche to be interesting or are demonstrating a dangerous blind spot. We want specific, honest competitive positioning.
  3. What is the hardest problem your company has not yet solved? The quality of the answer to this question is one of the most reliable indicators of founder quality that we have found. Founders who cannot identify a genuinely hard unsolved problem are not being honest. Founders who identify it clearly and can articulate their current thinking about how to solve it are demonstrating the kind of intellectual honesty we look for in long-term partners.
  4. Walk me through the economics of your last three enterprise deals. Deal-level economics — selling process, pricing, services component, time to value realization, first expansion — reveal the real unit economics of the business in a way that aggregate metrics do not.
  5. What does your board need to see in the next 18 months to believe this company is on track to $100M ARR? This question is really about strategic clarity. Does the founder have a crisp, internally-consistent view of the metrics and milestones that demonstrate progress? Or is the answer vague and qualitative?

What Founders Get Wrong in Early Conversations

After years of first meetings, certain failure modes appear with remarkable regularity. Identifying them is useful not to make founders feel self-conscious but because they are correctable.

Leading with product instead of market. The most common pattern we see: a founder opens the meeting with a product demo or a detailed feature walkthrough. We understand the impulse — the product is what the team has spent years building, and founders are rightfully proud of it. But investors at our stage are not primarily evaluating product quality. We are evaluating market position, revenue quality, and team caliber. The product is one input into those assessments, not the primary one. Lead with the market problem and the commercial traction. Show the product to illustrate your solution, not to sell us on it.

Obscuring unit economics. Some founders are reluctant to share precise unit economics data — either because the metrics are weaker than they would like, or because they fear that detailed data sharing increases competitive risk. We understand the instinct, but it has an unintended effect: it signals that the founder either does not know their unit economics in detail or has something to hide. Both interpretations reduce our conviction. Share the numbers. If specific metrics are below where you would like them, get ahead of it: explain what is driving them and what the improvement trajectory looks like.

Avoiding the competition question. Founders who try to minimize or deflect competitive questions are universally less compelling than founders who engage with competition directly and with nuance. We are going to do the competitive analysis regardless. Founders who have done it more rigorously than we have are demonstrating the kind of intellectual honesty and market awareness that we find attractive.

Over-promising on near-term metrics. We track what founders tell us in first meetings and compare it to what the company actually delivers. Founders who consistently over-promise and under-deliver lose credibility irreparably. Founders who set conservative expectations and beat them consistently are the ones we want to back over the long term. Under-promise. Over-deliver. Every time.

From First Meeting to Term Sheet: The Typical Timeline

If the first meeting goes well — meaning we see the market, the metrics, and the founder quality we look for — we will typically progress to a deeper engagement within two weeks. This involves a more detailed financial review, preliminary customer and competitive research, and additional conversations with the broader management team.

Over the following six to eight weeks, we will run our structured diligence process. Throughout this period, we try to maintain regular communication with the founder — weekly or bi-weekly updates on where we are in the process and what questions we are working through. We believe the diligence period is itself a test of the investment relationship: founders who engage openly with our questions, correct misunderstandings proactively, and maintain composure through the process are demonstrating exactly the management quality we are looking for.

If the process produces the conviction we need, we move to term sheet within five business days of investment committee approval and typically close within 30 days of execution. We work hard to maintain this timeline because we know that capital uncertainty is one of the most distracting and debilitating forces for a management team trying to run their business.

If you believe your company fits the BeMoreeDriven profile — growth stage, enterprise technology, NRR above 120%, gross margins above 70% — we genuinely want to hear from you. The best investment relationships start with honest conversations. We are ready to have one.