Welcome back to Fail Smart, where I share my journey as a founder and CEO of a creative tech platform that’s revolutionizing the creator economy for Black and African creators. I talk about my wins, my epic fails, and all the lessons in between. I've made the mistakes, so you don’t have to!
Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve raised $2 million in seed funding! It’s been a long road to reach this milestone, and while I’m thrilled with the result, I want to be transparent about the journey. It’s been anything but easy — full of rejections, false promises, and navigating an economic downturn — all while pivoting AMAKA from a media company for Pan-African women to become an even more impactful creator platform. This experience completely altered my brain chemistry and reshaped how I see myself as a founder (in the best way possible). I’m sharing my fundraising story, broken down into numbers, to help others on their path.
$2 Million Raised
With participation from Morgan Stanley, Equitane Ventures, and angel investors, this funding will fuel the growth and development of AMAKA. Our focus is on scaling our platform, introducing AMAKA Gigs to connect brands with Black and diverse creative talent across Africa and the diaspora. The creative talent discovery process is currently fragmented, so we’re optimizing our platform to foster growth opportunities for creatives while helping businesses commission, pay, and manage talent seamlessly. We're also launching more creator tools to help showcase their work, build community, and diversify income streams through subscriptions and events.
Plus, we’re rolling out financial tools and partnerships to make accessing funds, managing cash flow, and centralizing income easier for creators and creative businesses. For more information on our raise, progress, and what we’ve got cooking, check it out here.
2 Years to Close the Round
I raised $2 million over a two year period. Despite early wins with partnerships from brands like Nike and YouTube, the economic downturn forced many venture capitalist (VC) firms to significantly reduce disbursing funds to new companies, making it harder for us to pivot to our current tech platform. But this pushed us to refine our business model around branded partnerships and sustain ourselves to power through with the pivot. For anyone fundraising, expect it to take time, and make sure you have enough runway for at least 6-12 months to survive the pitching and negotiation process. There are ways to speed things up, though:
Insights:
- Build in public: Share your growth metrics regularly on LinkedIn or social media. This keeps your community and target investors engaged and can help speed up conversations.
- Reach out to prospects before you start to raise: For future rounds (like potentially our Seed+ or Series A), I will start talking to potential investors about their expectations 6–12 months ahead of our raise. These early conversations will give you a clear roadmap for where your business needs to be to attract investors.
120 Pitch Deck Iterations
That’s how many times I reworked my deck! As a first-time founder, I had to learn to keep it lean and focused. Investors spend only seconds skimming through pitch decks, so make yours as punchy and succinct as possible. It shouldn't be more than 12 slides
Here’s the structure I used in our pitch deck:
- Problem: The issue you’re trying to solve and key data to support your slide.
- Solution: An overview of your product and how it addresses the problem.
- Business Model: How you make money.
- Traction: Include this at the start if you’ve made significant strides—it helps hook investors early.
- Market Size: The total addressable market (TAM)* and the serviceable addressable market (SAM)*.
- Competitor Analysis: A simple table outlining how your product features and unique selling points (USPs) compare to competitors.
- Team: Investors typically invest in the founding team at the early stages, so it’s crucial to convey why you and your team are the right people to solve this problem as well as your ability to pivot quickly when necessary.
- Financials: Your growth and financial targets for the next 3-5 years.
Insights: Iterating my deck made me realise, how you start won’t be how you finish. Stay agile and build a lean, adaptable team. Weekly experiments and data analysis should be at the core of your approach to help you find your product market fit, which helped us arrive at our new business model, ultimately leading us to get funded.
Over 100 Cold Outreach Emails
I reached out to 100 VCs and angels with cold emails, landing a 5% meeting conversion rate and only one successful investment from a cold lead: Morgan Stanley. All other success came from warm introductions. Most fundraising success comes from who you know. Cold emails rarely work because investors are inundated with pitches and requests for meetings.
What to do instead:
- Create a list of target investors and VCs.
- List the name of the partners as well as the associates in your spreadsheet.
- Look them up on LinkedIn and check for mutual connections.
- Ask your mutual connection for an introduction
- Make it easy for them by sharing a short bio of your business that they can include in their introductory email, outlining your traction, growth and progress in bullet points.
- If you don’t have a mutual connection, I would reach out to them on Linkedin instead of emailing them, as they often get a lot of pitches via. emails.
2. Tap into your professional and personal networks — Reach out to old colleagues, bosses, friends and family, or that old high/secondary school classmate, to make introductions. I believe in six degrees of separation, so leave no stone unturned.
3. Attend networking events and panels to build investor connections — Attend the panels they’re speaking at. Ask questions during the Q+A session and always introduce yourself to make yourself known. Don’t be shy to approach them afterwards.
0.34%
This is the abysmal percentage of venture capital that goes to Black women founders in the U.S. It’s something I’ll keep highlighting until we see real change. As mentioned, the VC world thrives on warm introductions, which makes it difficult to break in for founders of colour, especially for women. But there are communities out there making it easier, providing resources to founders to help them navigate the venture capital space. Here are a few that I know and/or have been involved with.
Africa
Europe
U.S.
Bootstrapping is Sexy
Bootstrapping* is underrated, and profitability is the real flex. My advice is to always prioritize solid revenue growth and a roadmap to profitability, over wooing institutional investors in the early stages. Always ask, ‘Can my company survive without an investor?’ Sometimes the shiny fundraising announcements can be distracting, and honestly they used to demoralise me and make me feel jaded. Fundraising is incredibly time consuming which took me away from actually building the business at times. Fundraising is a very difficult topic for me and I would rather not speak in depth about the emotional turmoil that came with it (maybe for another post). I know, it’s ironic saying this in a post announcing our raise, but the truth is, I prefer bootstrapping and I would like to see more profitability announcements rather than fundraising announcements.
Bootstrapping gives you the freedom to grow on your own terms. Remember, not every business is VC-backable, and that’s okay. There are so many successful businesses that haven't taken a dime from external investors. VCs look for high-growth industries, often tech, where they expect a 5–10x return. That can put intense pressure on founders, so choose wisely.
If bootstrapping alone is not an option, I’ve shared other ways you can finance your business, check out my previous newsletter here.
But if you are set on raising capital…
I’ve put together an Excel sheet of VCs that invest in creative tech startups, women founders, and African entrepreneurs. This was a resource I wished I had when I started out. You can find it here.
You can also reach out to me if you’d like me to make some introductions to my investors and angels (only if you’re aligned with their investment thesis).
Definitions
Bootstrapping: Building a business using personal savings or revenue generated by the business itself, without relying on external funding.
Total Addressable Market (TAM): The total revenue opportunity available for a product or service if it could capture 100% of its market.
Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM): The portion of the Total Addressable Market that a company can realistically target and serve based on its products, services, and geographic reach.
Updates & Resources
Thank you for reading! The team and I are hard at work, making some adjustments to the Fail Smart Newsletter. In addition to sharing my personal experiences building a business in the creative sector, we’ll be looking at highlighting more industry trends, insights and interviews that would be more useful to our community. Stay tuned!
As always we have resources to help creative business connect with creators:
- If you’re a business owner looking to hire creative talent: We've launched a simple form to help you find the right talent that aligns with your project needs. Tell us what you're looking for, and we’ll take care of the rest! You’ll also be entered into a raffle to win $150 and a written feature for your business on AMAKA. Submit your request here.
- AMAKA Grant: We're awarding up to $500 monthly to two creative businesses, covering the cost of essential tools like Canva, HubSpot, and more. Go to the Wallet section in your AMAKA Studio dashboard to apply.
- Earn $50: When you refer a brand to the AMAKA platform, you can earn a $50 cash reward, and the brand gets $50 in AMAKA credits for their next gig. Get your unique referral link here.
- Creator Partner Programme: Get the tools you need to grow your brand and access more brand deals through our community programme. We teach you how to pitch, provide sales resources, and you earn money whenever you onboard a brand to AMAKA. Apply here.