When you can convince an investor after a first meeting to spend more time on your case, they will come up with a lot of questions.

These questions are increasingly asked via email. I, in my VC capacity, personally always create a Google Doc and add my questions there.

I’ve seen too many founders answering all questions they got via email (or in a doc) again and again and often directly in an email.

Don’t do that. It’s a mess for you and will soon be a mess for the investors as well when they need to search for answers in email threads.

Here is a clear best practice to follow: Create a Q&A page in your data room which sits ideally in Notion – for each investor you’re talking to.

So, if you talk to Sequoia, you’d create a Q&A page for Sequoia.

Whenever Sequoia asks a question, whether via email, WhatsApp, or whatever asynchronous channel, you add that question to that individual Q&A page and answer it there.

When you added new answers, you go back to Sequoia and write them:

„Thanks for the questions, we added them together with our answers to our data room (add link).”

This way, you ensure that there is a single source of truth – one destination that aggregates all questions and answers, instead of having your answers spread to different email/WhatsApp/etc. Threads.

It also helps you to build a repository of all questions in a disciplined way and to easily copy, paste, and edit answers to similar questions from different investors. And you’ll see that most of these investors will have similar questions.

But as importantly this will be a great service for investors. I love it when founders do this. It helps me to have all answers along the whole process in one central place, without doing anything for it. It helps me to pull out certain answers spontaneously when we need them in a team discussion. And it helps to create an investment memo with information pieces from the Q&As.

The investor will also appreciate how professional you handle this, strengthening their perception of your leadership and execution skills. A true win on all perspectives and sides.

The best of the best founders (yes, I mean you) even use the same technique for questions they get in live conversations: They answer them in the discussion, but add them (sometimes with additional facts), to the Q&A list after the call. Oh boy – how much I love it when founders do this. Fantastic service, as I don’t need to take notes and then document the answers by myself.

An additional advantage for you: instead of relying on the investor’s documentation skills – believe me, a lot can get lost in translation – you have it in your own hands when you provide the documentation for the answer.

The back and forth when investors start to spend time on your case can get out of control quickly, especially when you’ve a bunch of engaged investors.

Your process excellence will have a huge impact on how efficiently you can handle this and how the answers you deliver will be best processed by investors.

By the way – a lot of investors will shoot questions whenever they come up which could lead to a constant inflow of separate questions.

Some founders are okay with that – they like to answer every single question whenever it comes up.

But others don’t. A strong founder I recently engaged with asked me to bundle my questions and send them only in aggregated form. I respected that a lot.

If you think it would be better for you to get aggregated lists of questions instead of single ad hoc questions, let the investor politely know about your preference.

It will also elevate your perception in their eyes. It’s a good opportunity to show acts of defiance and let the investor feel that you’re not obeying (founders in my FundraisingCOUP program learn why). But don’t do it for the sake of the latter – do it if you genuinely prefer that option.