In a 2018 Forbes piece, Sue Heilbronner, co-founder and CEO of MergeLane, said the most important seven words: "My first due diligence step is LinkedIn."
Yet, if you raised your Seed round in the last year or two, I’d bet the last thing your company published was the funding announcement.
That’s normal. Once the round closed, you went heads-down on hiring, pilots and your first customers.
The blog could wait. Your LinkedIn could wait. Heck, marketing could wait. You’d sort it out before the Series A.
But investors start forming a view of you months before you send them the first deck. They read whatever they can find, especially what the internet says about you.
Right now, that’s mostly silence.
As a result, I see founders lose investors’ trust in four ways before they’ve booked a single meeting, all are contributing to the weirdly accepted statistic that getting 1 yes out of 200 messages is somehow okay.
(rant for another time)
Let’s go through them.
1. What happens when you go silent on LinkedIn after your Seed announcement?
There’s a very common pattern I see on most founder profiles I audit.
The Seed announcement gets a few hundred likes → congratulations pour in → then nothing → a company repost in month 4 → conference photo in month 7.
To you, that silence is focus. To an investor, who has a ton of questions trying to figure out who you are, that silence leaves them with assumptions. And as a famous detective once said, “In an investigation, assumptions kill.”
Somewhere between 78% and 84% of investors check a founder’s LinkedIn before a first meeting. So picture what happens after the intro email lands.
- A partner clicks your name and finds a 14-month-old funding post.
- Nothing since.
- No thinking process, no progress updates, no strong point of view.
They’ve formed an impression before you’ve said a word.
An empty profile reads as missing credibility, which shifts the whole burden of proof onto your meeting.
Now you have 30 minutes to do what another founder in your category has been doing publicly for a year.
That founder is the real problem you should be worried about. The partner has been reading their posts for months and already knows how they think. You’re a stranger with a deck.
It gets worse after the meeting.
Even if the associate loves you, they still have to sell you to the partnership on Monday. The other founder’s champion forwards three posts that make the case for them. Yours forwards a deck and says, "trust me, he’s worth the $5M he’s asking for."
Silence also raises a question no one will ask out loud: if this founder can’t explain their thinking in public, how will they recruit a VP of Sales, win over a utility, or raise a Series B?
Because I don’t know if you knew this, but when investors consider you for Series A they’re already thinking how well you might do raising Series B.
And the cost of inaction gets worse.
Every month you don’t build in public is a month you can’t get back. You can’t suddenly explain everything there’s to know about you, your company, your mission, your industry that’s worth a year of consistent thought leadership in the last six weeks before a raise.
What I’d do instead if I were you:
- Pick 2–3 topics you’ll own until your Series A. Your market, your technology, and what scaling is teaching you are safe starting points. If everything you publish fits one of them, your profile will read like a thesis a year from now, not a scrapbook.
- Turn your monthly investor update into public content. Strip the numbers you can’t share and keep the reasoning: why you changed pricing, what the pilot taught you, which assumption turned out wrong.
- Set a cadence you can hold for a year. One post a week beats five in one week followed by two months of nothing. Investors notice consistency more than volume, because consistency is exactly what they’re trying to predict.
- Share progress as lessons, not announcements. "We signed our third utility" is PR. "Why our third utility took half as long to close as our first" is thinking, and only one of those builds trust.
2. Leaving a dead blog on your website
There are two ways to have a dead blog.
The obvious one: nothing since your funding announcement. A press release about a pilot, a launch-week post, then 14 months of silence.
The sneaky one is harder to spot, because it looks alive but really isn’t.
When I started working with a founder in energy, I opened his company blog expecting a gap. Instead I found an agency’s output: new posts every month, all of them AI-generated, all built on the same generic structure. I’d been ghostwriting his LinkedIn for months and knew his buyers better than almost anyone, and I still couldn’t tell who a single article was written for.
Underneath sat years of legacy posts: memes, sustainability news roundups, nothing that sounded like him.
He was paying for that.
Just as an example:
- What the agency published once: "The Role of LED in Industrial Facilities"
- What we publish now: "Multi-Site LED Upgrades: How to Turn 60 Small Sites Into One Project Worth Financing"
One of those could be generated by ChatGPT in 10 seconds. An investor doing diligence knows that, because increasingly they’re asking ChatGPT themselves. A blog full of commodity content is just a dead blog with better SEO.
Another client had a different version of the same problem.
Her "blog" was a list of links to press coverage. It was impressive, but every entry told readers what someone else thought of her company, and every click sent them off her site. Not one page said what she thought.
The worst part is you’ll never see the damage.
No investor emails to say they read your blog and passed. No buyer tells you the articles confused them. They just don’t take the second meeting, and you blame the deck.
That’s exactly why founders leave it this way.
In the energy founder’s case, it wasn’t even him who noticed. It was his marketing manager, whose plans kept getting pushed because the content underneath them was hollow.
What I’d do instead if I were you:
- Read every post as a stranger would. Ask two questions: who is this for, and what does it say that only we could say? If you can’t answer both, archive it.
- Move press releases and coverage links to a news page. They can still exist. They just shouldn’t be what someone finds when they click "Blog."
- Stop paying for commodity content. If an article could have come out of ChatGPT, you’re paying for it twice: once in fees, once in credibility.
- Mine what you’ve already said. Your best LinkedIn posts, sales call transcripts, and investor Q&A are full of thinking nobody outside the room has seen.
- Publish one personality article a month. For the energy founder, this takes none of his time. Topics come from his posts, sales calls, and our content calls, and his marketing manager approves each one, usually without edits.
3. What does AI search say about your startup when an investor asks it?
Remember the investor asking ChatGPT during diligence?
Affinity surveyed 297 private capital professionals in September 2024, and 64% said they use AI to speed up company research. A year earlier, it was 55%.
Your buyers are doing the same. In G2’s August 2025 survey of more than 1,000 B2B software buyers, half said they now start their research in an AI chatbot instead of Google.
So I tested what the AI tells them.
On 1 July 2026, I sent the energy founder the results of an AI discoverability test.
I’d taken 21 questions that CFOs, facilities managers, sustainability managers, investors and senior hires in his UK market ask. I put them to ChatGPT (in a temporary chat with memory off), Gemini and Perplexity, without using his name. I left Claude out, because it already knew he was my client.
Each engine could score up to 42. ChatGPT scored 2, Gemini scored 2 and Perplexity scored 0.
An investor asking about UK energy efficiency or ESCO companies got nothing from any of them. Same for UK energy-as-a-service startups beyond solar.
Then I asked about him by name, and every engine knew him in full detail. In the report, I called it a perfect lookup and a near-invisible discovery.
For a raise, that split is what hurts.
An investor who got your name from a warm intro will find you fine. But an investor asking AI which companies to look at in your category gets a list without you on it, and that’s the investor you didn’t have an intro to.
One answer came back empty everywhere.
I asked for the most influential founders in his niche, and no engine named a single one. Nobody owns that answer yet. Whoever publishes enough for AI to quote will, and in your category, that could be the founder from section 1, the one the partner has been reading for a year.
This is where founders expect a quick fix: publish a few articles before the raise and watch the answers change. But an article starts a slow process on the day you publish it. It needs time to get found, and more time for other people to start quoting it, which is what AI leans on most.
Until then, AI keeps describing your company with whatever else it can find. For a quiet founder, that’s a funding post and a dead blog.
What I’d do instead if I were you:
- Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude what your company does and who leads your category, and save the answers. Use a fresh chat with memory off, so your own history doesn’t shape the answer. I walked through how to run and score this check in Issue 12.
- List the questions you hear most on sales and investor calls. Write them down in the words the caller used. These are the same questions they type into ChatGPT when you’re not in the room.
- Turn each question into an article titled the way people would search it. The multi-site LED article above works this way. Its title is a question a facilities manager could type word for word: how to turn 60 small sites into one project worth financing.
- Write with clear definitions and specific numbers that AI can quote. Say what your company does in one plain sentence near the top. Put a date and a source next to every number, so it can be checked and repeated.
- Re-run the same checks every quarter to see what’s changed. Same questions, same engines, same settings, so the scores are comparable. Write the first scores down, so you have a baseline to beat.
- Get cited by podcasts, newsletters and guest articles. AI answers lean on third-party sources. Muck Rack analysed more than 25 million links cited by AI and found 84% of them came from earned media, against 0.3% for paid content. So once you have articles worth quoting, pitch them to the podcasts and newsletters your buyers already read.
4. Does a content sprint right before a raise work?
The usual fix for all three is a ’sprint’.
Three months before the raise, you start posting every week, restart the blog and try to get into the AI answers.
But each of those takes much longer than three months to see results.
(LinkedIn gurus would argue with me here, but they often have no idea what they’re talking about)
Take the blog.
Patrick Stox at Ahrefs found that only about 6% of new pages reach Google’s top 10 within a year. The pages that do rank are old: 72.9% of the top 10 are more than three years old, and the #1 result is five years old on average.
AI answers build up slowly too, because they lean on other people quoting you, as you saw in section 3. And the partner reading your profile will see exactly when the posting started.
Then there’s the raise itself.
It’s the busiest stretch of your year, and the first thing to go when your calendar fills up is whatever has no deadline. So the sprint fades halfway through the raise, and the partner who checks your profile in month two finds silence again.
Meanwhile, the gap between Seed and Series A keeps getting longer.
Carta data analysed by SaaStr covers 3,365 US startups that raised a Series A between 2018 and 2025. Among the ones that raised in Q3 2025, 39% took three years or more to get there from their Seed. In Q3 2019, it was 19%. Peter Walker, Carta’s Head of Insights, put it plainly: "18 to 24 months is out of date. It’s more like 24 to 30."
So a founder in your category who started publishing the month they closed their Seed will walk into their Series A with two years of posts and articles behind them.
A sprint gives you three months.
What I’d do instead if I were you:
- Start at least 9 to 12 months before you plan to raise. That gives an investor who clicks your name close to a year of thinking to read, and gives your first articles time to get found and quoted. If your raise ends up closer to Walker’s 24 to 30 months, you’ll have even more to show.
- Build a backlog from material you already have. Pitch Q&A, investor updates and call transcripts are full of answers you’ve already given. Turn a few months’ worth into drafts before the first one goes live, so one busy month doesn’t break the cadence.
- Protect one hour a week for an interview-style session with whoever drafts for you. A prospect told me that if content takes too much time, "these activities will be the first to be canceled." That’s honest, and it’s why the time cost has to stay small and fixed. One hour, same slot every week: you talk through what you’re seeing, and whoever drafts for you turns it into posts and articles.
- Keep the same cadence once the raise starts instead of spiking it. Partners check your profile most while you’re raising, so that’s the worst time for it to change. A burst of posts looks aimed at them, and going quiet takes you back to where section 1 started. Keep doing exactly what you did the month before.
Your Series A might be 12 to 18 months away, or it might be 30. Either way, start now, while publishing still looks like conviction instead of a campaign.
Stick with it, and by the time you raise, you’ll be the founder in your category the partner has already been reading for a year.
Talk soon,
Roman
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