Creator Spotlight: Jason Yeh author of Fundraising Fieldnotes

Jason Yeh is giving away a lot, for free. He is funneling his extensive experience in working in venture capital and as a start-up founder tasked with raising capital, to support founders in their fundraising journeys. For Jason, It’s satisfying work to help founders and to have an outlet for his philosophical takes on the world of fundraising.

He got started while working one-on-one with founders who were informally referred to him, 90% of whom were asking for his insight into fundraising strategy, something he felt confident discussing. Later, wanting to scale the impact he was having, Jason soon after launched Fundraising Fieldnotes, a newsletter (and two accompanying podcasts) that allows him to elaborate about fundraising and to reach many more founders. Start-up founders come from all types of backgrounds and bring their unique experience to the products they create and the company culture they cultivate.

Raising early capital is not typically a part of a first-time founder’s experience and even for experienced founders, the fundraising environment is constantly changing. Jason is uniquely capable of writing about complex concepts of fundraising in digestible language, illustrating frameworks and creating tools and resources that can serve as a guide to raising capital. As one reader wrote to Jason, “most of what [our] company is today is either because of the investors that were part of the journey or the team. But before we got them, the art that you taught in your content, that's what attracted the investors and the team. If there is someone special who deserves this acknowledgment and appreciation, it's you sir!”

Less experienced founders preparing for or in the process of early stage fundraising may be the target audience, but this is not to say that experienced or late-stage founders won’t benefit from Jason’s support- afterall, fundraising is a tricky and opaque art. Raising capital in 2019 is much different than raising capital in 2022 with a looming recession. There is always room to grow.

In addition to the content offered by Fundraising Fieldnotes, Jason continues to work with founders more directly with different tiers of support, and over those past year, those founders have raised $250 million collectively. The number raised by his readers and podcast listeners? Impossible to know but his growing brand and deepening impact speaks to a very high number. Jason and I spoke about common misconceptions in fundraising and why switching to beehiv was the only sensible option.

The Newsletter: Fundraising Fieldnotes

Writers: Jason Yeh

Top posts to check out

The guide to Calendar Density, a fundraising power move

The misunderstood parts of dilution and venture math

2022 Goals

We’re aiming to reach 10-20 thousand subscribers. We’ve launched our second podcast and we’d like to launch a third podcast. We want to support as many founders as possible through all the channels we leverage.

Tell me about Fundraising Fieldnotes

Fundraising Fieldnotes is the insider's guide to fundraising for anyone raising money for a startup or in the process of planning to raise money. Fundraising Fieldnotes is a weekly publication that demystifies the fundraising process and helps founders by unlocking vital tactics, best practices, and free tools to supercharge their fundraise.

Previous newsletter platform and why you switched

We started on Substack, the biggest shortcomings were the lack of a referral program and the metric ton of friction we experienced trying to find a third-party integration.

Favorite beehiiv feature

The beehiiv team is extremely responsive and committed to making our experience as content creators as efficient and effective as possible. I have emailed for support at 8PM and received a response from Tyler Denk, the CEO of the company, just an hour later. The whole team is extraordinarily helpful.

Advice for anyone considering a switch to beehiiv

Beehiiv presented the most sensible combination of simplicity, intuitive referral program, subscriber analytics, and reasonable pricing.

What are the common misconceptions about fundraising?

We’ve seen that founders will read or hear about about large number fundraises and it sounds like it was done in a really short amount of time. Even the fastest fundraises probably had a lot of prep before them, including years of slowly building network and credibility. This combined with three to six months prep before actually starting a fundraising campaign.

Who is your target audience?

I have tweeted that founders, whether they are great or bad, will get funded if they have great fundraising skills. But great founders with bad fundraising skills won’t get the funding they need. And that is who I’m trying to help.

Are there tiers of support you offer founders?

For 98% of founders, we help for free. The idea is to give away our expertise for free. There are always people in the audience who want more tailored content to their situation. These 1-2% of founders in our audience who want more support and join an accelerator or fundraising program we offer or some one-on-one time with me.

Concepts and philosophies that I teach apply to fundraising at any level. Where people find the most lift in when they are is in the beginning stages, founders who are thinking of raising anywhere from the first dollar to series A. I have readers who have already raised millions of dollars. It’s such an opaque and tricky art, so there’s always ways you improve.

How are you approaching growth?

Our main approach is to continue to create great content consistently. This builds in expectations. Along the way, we are creating more specific tools and information resources. Documents, spreadsheets, etc. embed those in our essays. We aim to provide as much value as we can and create more trust in our content. It’s a process learning how to leverage social media and getting the algorithms to promote our stuff. It’s slow but an effective way of growing our reach, we aren’t perfect with it but we are getting better at posting our content and letting it spread.

The referral program has been fun to launch and there is a lot of experimenting tht we can do. We’re seeing it add subscribers to our way. We’re using tools that our audience would benefit from, plans for preparing for fundraising, templates and videos that can help a founder prepare, as incentives for the program. With five referrals, we offer a one-on-one pitch deck review.

What is it like creating content after years of working in venture capital and being a start-up founder yourself?

The content creation is very satisfying, I feel very lucky to have found the opportunity to build a business that is so deeply aligned with a lot of my passions and interests. Heping people is really fun, but on a more selfish side, helping people by leveraging something I’m really good at is really satisfying. I’ve never had an opportunity to have a creative outlet in my life, it’s been computer science, investment, or running companies. Now a big portion of my business is thinking about how to creatively communicate concepts, whether through the written word, illustrations I draw, audio, video. I’m not expert, I haven’t been trained in it. It’s super satisfying and very fun to figure it out.

Advice for other writers

Consistency is key. You have to be consistently excited to creat content even for a small audience, because you like the content creation process even if only one or a handful of people read it. If you go into it being like I want to get to 50k subscribers so i can monetize and make money, it’s going to be hard to stay consistent if audience growth is slower than you’re hoping for. It’s super important to start at a point that you want to create this for 5 people and go from there.

Want more?

Make sure to follow Jason on Twitter here and subscribe to his newsletter here!