Investor Outreach Calculator
Most founders size their outreach against the number of cheques they need. That is the wrong denominator. You are hunting for one or two term sheets — the rest of the round follows the lead in. Put your own numbers in and see what the round actually requires.
How to read this
The calculator runs two tracks, because a round is not one funnel. The lead track works backwards from term sheets: how many second meetings a term sheet takes, therefore how many first meetings, therefore how many investors you contact. The follower track is easier — once a lead has committed and priced the round, qualified followers convert several times better, so filling the remainder costs far fewer conversations than winning the lead did.
The lever that matters
Warm share moves the answer more than anything else on this page. At half your list warm, the defaults produce a pipeline you can run. At none of it warm, the same round needs three to four times the contacts — which is the arithmetic behind the advice to spend two days building a qualified list before writing a single email. Asking for a second term sheet roughly doubles the work again; that is the real price of the negotiating leverage that sets your valuation.
When the number comes back too big
Above roughly 120 investors, one of two things is true. Either the list is not qualified — funds on it cannot write your cheque at your stage — or the story is not converting and more volume will only produce more rejections. Both are fixed upstream, in how the list is built and what the first email says.
These are reasoned assumptions, not measured benchmarks. The defaults describe a decent-but-not-hot European early-stage company working a qualified list with warm paths — the process described in the guides on this site, not a cold spray to a database. Your own numbers after twenty contacts are worth more than any of them. Replace them as soon as you have them.
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The checklist I've given to 500+ startups before fundraising.
5 questions every investor checks before they say yes. Most founders don't have an answer — and it costs them the round.