Alex Edquist is co-founder & CEO of Good Agriculture, an Atlanta-based startup that provides business services to the farming community. This fall, Good Agriculture closed a $650,000 pre-seed fundraising round led by Terra Regenerative Capital, Texas-based Harvest Returns, and G-Force. After a year-long fundraising journey and making her rounds on the pitching circuit, Alex had some clear, helpful, and candid learnings from the fundraising process.

I’m Alex, the founder of Good Agriculture. We’re an early-stage start-up that just closed a $650,000 pre-seed round, and it was a JOURNEY.

As an introduction, Good Agriculture is a farm business management platform that handles farmers finances and funding applications so they can focus on what they do best: the farming! We save farmers hundreds of hours and have helped them get significantly more profitable so they can re-invest into the farm and into adopting regenerative practices. Here are my reflections after our recent raise:

Fundraising takes A LONG TIME. 

I was not appropriately calibrated when we started fundraising. After all, hasn’t everyone seen all those start-up influencer think pieces on their great fundraising process and getting their round closed in 2-3 weeks? I thought it would take ~3-4 months at most. After our first 50 no’s, I was bewildered, anxious, and angry. Several more experienced founders helped me to understand that a long process is NORMAL — it wasn’t that our start-up was doomed, it was just how the process usually went (especially when you’re not a multiple-time-exited founder or someone with Sam Altman as an angel investor). It ended up taking 200 no’s before we got our first yes. Our investor pipeline ended up with 800 names on it.

People really want to help. 

There were SEVENTY-SEVEN different people who made warm introductions for us. There were countless others who helped with pitch practice, crafting our story, investor targeting, and of course, helping us grow the start-up. Many fellow founders were there in our darkest days and helped us find the resilience to keep going. My heart is so full of gratitude. 

But the discrimination is real. 

I admit, when I started Good Agriculture, I assumed that a lot of sexism had been fixed. In all my years at McKinsey working in overwhelmingly male-dominated industries (AI & analytics, manufacturing, mining, etc.), I only felt what I thought was sexism once. I mean, it’s the 2020s, most of us are past this, right? I was NOT ready for the rampant discrimination that happens in start-up investing. Whoa, it’s bad, y’all. I can’t tell you the number of times I was asked “who built your MVP?” (uh, my cofounder and I, who are ladies who code) or told “you should really hire an AI expert” (right after I shared my consulting experience leading teams to build AI/ML products for clients). One of our (male) interns shadowed some of our investor calls and made the comment “you’d said there was discrimination in start-ups, but it was wild to watch it happen in real time.” 

The investor grapevine is CRAZY. 

I have no idea how this actually happens, but it seems like investors have a mycorrhizal-fungi-like network (or Avatar-tree-like network for the non-soil-biology-nerds on this newsletter) sharing all this start-up intel. I can’t tell you the number of times I had an investor say “I’m Investor A, I heard about you from Investor B who’s Investor C’s best friend.” (Meanwhile, I haven’t even heard of Investor C, so presumably there was an Investor D or E who started this whole chain). 

Investors either get it or they don’t. 

In my hundreds of conversations, I never once convinced an investor who was skeptical at the onset that there was actually a big opportunity in what we’re doing. Many of these investors did end up being helpful in sharing us around to investors who did get it (see point #4), so these conversations were still valuable, but I would have spent way less time following up with the folks who were never going to invest. 

And one final thought to share, I’d like to make a quick endorsement for RFSI. Two years ago at RFSI, we met our first customer, and at least year’s RFSI, we met our first investor (in line for coffee in between sessions)! A lot of fundraising is luck – but we multiplied our luck by putting ourselves in physical rooms with the right people, and the folks attending RFSI are incredible.