How to Announce Your Fundraise

Hey y’all — fundraising is one thing, announcing your fundraise is another.

After the money’s been wired, you probably just want to tell everyone about it. It’s an exciting thing.

But there are a lot of reasons to be more strategic about your announcement, and a lot of factors you should consider to shape how, where, and when to announce it.

It’s a moment of organic gravity for your startup, product, and brand — don’t treat it as an afterthought.

When we raised our Series A from a16z we didn’t do everything perfectly with our announcement, but we did enough right to make it a trajectory-changing event for the company.

This week I’m breaking down:

• How to time your announcement

• How to drive attention to your announcement

• Where to announce

• What to include

• The most common mistake I see

How to Announce Your Fundraise

Timing Your Announcement

You can set one of two primary goals for announcing a fundraise:

1. Accelerate the business (user growth, partnerships, and/or hiring)

2. Kick off your next round

If you nail the execution of your announcement then investors are going to reach out either way, so here’s a simple framework to decide what your primary goal should be:

Ask yourself two questions:

1. How much does the business need to grow more before raising more capital?

2. Do you need to accelerate growth to hit those numbers?

If you need substantial growth, and need to accelerate to hit it or don’t have your growth channels fully figured out yet then it’s a good idea to announce sooner rather than later and leverage the momentum you receive from the raise.

If either of those things are not true, then you’re likely better off holding the fundraise in your back pocket until you’re ready to raise again.

There are other practical reasons to wait, too.

For example, if you close your round in November or December you’re likely better off waiting to announce til February (everyone else will be announcing in January, which makes it noisy for fundraising announcements).

Driving Attention

Legacy media no longer has a monopoly on driving attention.

In fact, even tech publications sort of begrudgingly cover fundraises these days — if they do, it’s probably because the product fits some larger narrative they’re interested in.

The good news is you don’t need them, and you can nail your announcement solely with social media.

Here are some tips:

1. Announce in the morning → There are two reasons for this. First, when people log on throughout the day the content that will be at the top of their feed will be what the algo thinks they’ll be most likely to engage with, so getting engagement signals on your content before then increases the chances it will be shown. Second, after 12 hours or so your content will be relatively stale so you want those 12 hours to occur during the day, when most people are online. This is true no matter which social media platform you’re announcing on. The earlier, the better (I like 8:30am EST if you’re in the US, personally).

2. Coordinate ahead of time → Send an email to your entire contact list the day before letting them know you have a big announcement going live the following day, at a specific time, in a specific place (platform and account). Explicitly ask them to comment and repost on the announcement. Then, send another message with the post’s URL as a link immediately after it goes live.

3. Direct all traffic to a single place → The way to maximize reach on social media is immediate, relevant engagement on your post. This tells the algo that the post is interesting and should be shown to more people. If your email includes a link to your LinkedIn post, X post, website’s blog announcement, TechCrunch article, etc… then you’re going to dilute the impact of each one and the combined impact of all of them will be far less than the impact of one would have been. The difference is huge.

My creator partnership platform, Megaphone, can help with that last part btw. We let you get big creators involved and have helped tons of fundraising announcements at this point.

One founder even wrote me after their announcement saying it drove over 200 sales demos in the first couple hours.

Where to Announce

This one is simple:

Announce where it will have the biggest impact.

There are two factors:

1. Where will you have the biggest megaphone (no pun intended)?

2. Where do the people you want to get in front of spend their time online?

For example, if you’re optimizing for investor attention then you probably want to announce on X.

But if you have 10 followers on X and a million on TikTok, you might want to announce there instead.

You may also want to consider where you have the capability to create the most performant announcement post, but that’s secondary since you can always pay people to help create an engaging post.

Your guiding principle here is that you want your announcement to enter the zeitgeist in some way. Figure out where you have the best shot of making that happen.

What to Include

There’s some basic info that every announcement should have:

• How much you raised → Bigger looks better but including the number makes it real, no matter what it is.

• What round it is → This isn’t super important but does help people anchor their reaction.

• Who invested → Lead with well known names, and don’t @ them — just write their names (it’s more recognizable and the tag won’t matter since you’re alerting them via email anyway).

• Your company’s name → You’d be surprised, I’ve seen people forget this.

• Your one-liner → In a concise way, tell people what you actually do.

• More context → You likely have more to say that will fit in your one-liner. That’s ok. If you’re announcing on X just don’t pack it all into the first tweet — start a thread that’s well formatted for skimmability with generous whitespace.

• An image or video → People are visual, and posts with an image or video get a boost by the algo too.

• Somewhere to go → You want to drive this traffic somewhere. Ideally you can capture their emails.

Not everyone has an AI video model to launch at the same time as their fundraise announcement, but I’m including this as an example of one of the better announcements I’ve seen in the last year:

This violates the link-in-first-post rule, but the video had so much viral potential that it didn’t matter and likely worked in their favor (more impressions of the link = more link clicks).

And here was our Series A announcement (you can see we didn’t strictly follow the one-piece-of-content rule but it did well regardless, since we had a lot of hype at the time and did a good job driving attention to it):

One other point here — quality matters.

It’s worth announcing on your terms, once you have the post exactly how you want it since this will be your first impression to thousands of people.

The Most Common Mistake

Too often the main announcement post doesn’t say what the company actually does.

It might have big name investors and maybe even a concise, interesting backstory but 90%+ of the people who see the post are not going to click through to read all of it, or the entire thread, or watch the entire video.

I don’t mean to pick on anyone specific, but these are just some examples I saw recently of what is a much more common problem. I’m including them because they managed to do well despite making this mistake (not everyone is so lucky):

If you see these in your feed you have no clue what these companies do. They need you to be SO impressed by their investors or branding that you go read the rest of the announcement.

The second one doesn’t even have a thread below it, just a link to a press article that I’d bet less than 1% of the people who saw it clicked (and fewer read in full).

The third one’s link gives a high-level explanation in the description text for the link that’s included, but that’s not a good solution either because including links in the first post of a thread makes the post less likely to show up in people’s feeds.

My point:

You have a split second to alert people to who you are and what you do, on a post that will get 10x or 100x more attention than your average post — so say what you do.

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