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Fundraising readiness · Checklist

Investor-readiness self-audit

The twelve readiness questions as a checklist you can keep, work through, and come back to.

The Fundability Mini-Assessment asks these twelve questions and scores the answers. This is the same twelve as a list you can keep, work through over a few weeks, and come back to — the version that survives closing the tab.

Tick an item when you could walk someone through it and show your work, not when you think you probably could. The point of the exercise is finding the gaps while there is still time to close them, and an optimistic tick costs you the only thing this is for.

It is a self-assessment and nothing more. It is not an investor benchmark, not a probability, not a prediction about whether anyone will invest, and not a verdict on the company.

Checklist

What is in it

  • Readiness · 3 items

    Whether you know what the money is for and have the room to run a process.

  • Traction · 3 items

    Whether you can show what people are actually doing with what you built.

  • Timing · 3 items

    Whether the financing question is live right now, and what would settle it.

  • Evidence · 3 items

    Whether your numbers and your claims hold up when someone looks closely.

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Get the checklist

The template is ready. Add your email to open it, and you will also get The Raise Memo — a note for founders raising capital.

How to use it

Notes

Every item you could not tick is a gap, and the assessment itself will tell you what to do about each one — it carries a specific next action per question that this list deliberately does not duplicate. Run it once you have been through this on paper, and use the export here to keep the record of where you started.

Where this comes from

The thinking behind it

Take it with you

Use-of-funds one-pager

Set out what the money buys, milestone by milestone, on a single page an investor can read in a minute.

Copyable template

Milestone-to-raise map

Work backward from the milestone that makes the next round fundable to the raise that pays for it.

Copyable template

Key metrics definition sheet

Write down what each of your numbers actually means, so the definition never shifts between meetings.

Copyable template

Browse every template

From the publication

Read The Raise Memo

A note for founders raising capital—what investors notice, how conviction gets built, and what to do next.

Keep going