Why reaching VCs? "we have too many customers and we cannot fullfill the pipeline and we need to grow" ( I actually took this from a reddit saying this is what VCs want to hear ;) ). We are ~1M ARR and growing like hell. Pitch is ready. All numbers in the spreadsheet.
So I am passing the question to my dear HN: how a company in Europe can reach out to US investors? We maxed out our network reach, but so far no clue.
Are there certain platforms which enable this? Cold calling? Is HN the network I was missing? Can we advertise somewhere, like a VC board?
Any advice and hints are welcome!
PS. We will be in US from 13th to 16th of May in Las Vegas (or we can travel to west coast), available if someone wants to give us advice in person!
Now, this is not an answer to your original question, more of questioning your premise. If it could prevent a fatal round, all the better... Beware, many assumptions and hypotheticals incoming...
You state that: >we have too many customers and we cannot fullfill the pipeline and we need to grow
Is that customers or leads? Anyway, many customers and you cannot fulfill the pipeline, therefore your solution is to grow, therefore you're looking for money, therefore looking for investors.
You also state that: >We are ~1M ARR and growing like hell.
You already are growing like hell, why do you need investors' money? Have you tried other things?
These lead to many questions that may be useful to others as well...
Have your founders been the only ones doing sales so far and you now want to hire sales people to speed things up and scale and you decided you need money to do this?
Have you tested that non-founders can sell the product before deciding to ramp up your sales force? i.e: Would adding more sales people actually result in more revenue (and profit) or would they just be frustrated because you haven't set the "sales motion", prepared "sales assets", and set them up for success? Have you tried to do that with one person or two other than founders. You can start small and see where your sales process breaks when someone else does it.
You can't fulfill your pipeline... Which part, exactly? Is it qualifying? closing? etc. Can you find the phase that's causing back-pressure and get someone else to help just on that one and see if you can scale yourself that way for a portion of the pipeline?
Are your unit economics ready for scaling or will you be losing money? Money amplifies what you add it to, including chaos.
Have you reduced your sales complexity? Figuring out your sales process, breaking it up into steps, refactoring it, etc...
Have you analyzed your cash flow and looked into ways to improve it? How are you getting paid? Yearly or multi-year contracts with payment up-front or at the end of the contract? It changes something if you're getting paid before.
Even if you do all that and actually need money, have you considered getting the money from your clients? For example, a multi-year contract with payment up front so you have capital right now to do what you need to do, especially if your asking ticket is within the same order of magnitude of your ARR. That won't be money for equity, it won't even be debt; it'll be a sale which, if you ever talk with investors, would be positive.