Angel School has developed a proprietary Funnel Management framework for building and managing Angel syndicates. We’ve also measured benchmarks based on real-world experience running dozens of syndicates and deploying $ millions.
Syndicate leads would benefit from employing similar funnel management practices. Measuring their own metrics against Angel School Benchmarks will help identify areas of improvement.
TLDR
1. A Funnel Management approach to syndicates provides clear benefits to syndicate leads in terms of (i) scalability and repeatability, (ii) benchmarking, and (iii) deal course correction.
2. Angel School’s experience indicates the following as best-practice benchmarks:
- Stage 1 to 2 conversion - LP consent rate: 70+%.
- Stage 3: Deal publication - 65% email open rate, 5% click rate.
- Stage 3 to 4 conversion - Deal engagement rate: 22% (after complete activation cycle).
- Stage 5 - Commitment rate: 29%.
- Referral Loop - 1 to 2% per engaged or committed LP.
3. Beyond adoption of a Funnel Management Framework, syndicate leads should consciously develop hypotheses, design experiments, test new techniques and strategies against live dealflow to push their funnel benchmarks.
Introduction
Building and running a successful Angel syndicate requires syndicate leads to solve 3 separate challenges: (i) building and engaging an investor network, (ii) sourcing, filtering, diligencing and marketing deals, and (iii) efficiently raising deploying capital.
For all the work that goes into raising capital into a startup, we’re constantly thinking about optimizing everything we do- writing great copy, performing world-class diligence, maximizing allocation, and growing our network. None of that would be possible without a framework for measurement and benchmarking in place.
