Fundraising is a long and exhausting process. Every fundraise success story that you read online hides behind often hundreds of investor meetings that somehow nobody really talks about.

Making each investor meeting easier and repeatable should be your focus. Having a dataroom that is easy to manage should be on top of your list - it is often the first thing investors ask after they indicate being interested in your firm ("We like what you do and would like to dig in!").

We here at Notion Rooms have thus collected a handful of important concept you should be aware of when considering a fundraise.

Choose a secure, user-friendly platform that allows controlled access and activity tracking

You can not not have a dataroom when bracing for a fundraise. It is the place where you can put all of your key fundraise documents in a secure manner. So step 1, make sure you have a dataroom that is secure.

The dataroom should also be transparent - the best dataroom is the one that creates no additional friction for the visitor. The more transparent the dataroom, the better.

You will want your data room to have controlled access and activity tracking. Controlled access because you want to be able to invite people (and revoke their access if needed!) and activity tracker which will help you know whether people actually visit your dataroom (or maybe they never received the invite).

While Notion allows you inviting people into your workspaces, it does so with no analytics and no indication of whether someone has actually entered. For that, you will need a separate dataroom provider to help you get those documents.

Organize documents logically with clear folder structures and naming conventions

You wouldn't believe how often we have seen, as investors, dataroom that should rather be called datalakes - messy datadumps where the owner probably simply wishes that however visits the dataroom has some ungodly ability of stitching together the information within the files.

Have a look a our post on Phase 1 Dataroom, for example, to get a sense of how a dataroom index should look like. It should be really easy to follow: product related matters under product, team related matters under team, numbers under financials etc.

Ensure all documents are up-to-date, accurate, and professionally formatted

Some items will not change over time, but others will and for those you want to make sure your data room is up to date. One common omission is to not keep the financial plan updated as the fundraising prolongs. The investors base their decisions on what the model is showing, and if it turns out that a quarter went wrong, these actuals should be immediately reflected in the financial plan. Not doing so will result in many awkward questions from the investors and make your life more difficult.

Furthermore, it is also a good practice to give the files a number prefix: for example if "Product" is section 2 (i.e. "2. Product") then product overview could be "2.1 Product Overview".

Finally, focus on appearances! Remember you are selling and everything in the dataroom signals something about you. This also means the files itself - if your excels are nicely formatted, and powerpoints are clean, it. makes. a. difference. Why? Your house is in order and you focus on details. "I'm focusing on business so I don't have time to make them look pretty". No, you are fundraising and that is your priority for a while.

Write their victory speech

One of the most controversial items, and one which is exactly the reason I want to include it into this article, is writing the investors their investment memo themselves. This is basically the document that investors create that includes the entire investment thesis and take to their investment committee.

I would say that maybe 10-15% of companies I have seen during my 10 years tenure as an investor have that "investment memo" in the dataroom, but those who do have always ended up raising their round. It's highly unlikely that it would be because of the memo itself, but those who have that memo probably have their other bases equally well covered. Furthermore, writing this document from the investors' perspective as a founder can be quite revealing and help think of your business from a whole new angle.

Use analytics to track investor engagement and prepare for potential questions

Super important to track everyone who comes and goes to the dataroom. It directly correlates with how much time you should spend with each investor: if investor X has not even opened your dataroom link after few weeks, you can probably scratch them off from your list. Or it could also be that they haven't realised you sent them the invite, in which case it could be helpful to resend it.

Most importantly, having proper analytics in place gives you indication where investors are focusing their time on. Are they looking at product? The market? The financials? That helps you to refine your dataroom and improve the content as the fundraising progresses. Remember, fundraising is iterative process. It is rare that the very first investor is the one who ultimately says yes.

Fortunately, Notion Rooms fully supports page-by-page analytics. We know how crucial this is for a successful fundraise which is why we built it in from the get-go.

Revoke the access when the investor no longer needs to be in the dataroom

Remember to also revoke the access! You will be inviting a ton of investors into the dataroom and many will say no. There is little reason to keep the access open for them afterwards. The risk of a leak or them passing around the invite (which happens and is always disappointing) is too high. If the analytics suggest that an investor hasn't been to the dataroom for weeks, cut them off. They can always ask the access again.

Get Creative: Consider including supplementary materials like product demo videos or Loom recordings to enhance understanding

Finally, get creative! We're used to think that documents are only text and images. But today a lot can be done with recorded videos and screen recordings. Show the investors how the product works live while narrating the key features, or have your VP Sales describe the sales strategy in a video recording. Don't make the whole dataroom one big recording but certainly think outside the box!

Best thing is, Notion combined with Notion Rooms is great for all of the above as it comes with permissioned access, full page-by-page analytics, and more. Why not give it a try?