seed
Pickleheads Uses Metal to Identify Intros via Existing Investors
“Prior to Metal, we relied on LinkedIn and spreadsheets to identify who can introduce us to our list of targeted investors. With Metal, we are now able to discover the right investors, and then seamlessly see where our existing investors are able to connect us.”
Max Ade
Founder/CEO
Pickleheads is the #1 pickleball website, app and community. With the meteoric rise of pickleball, the Company has seen tremendous growth over the past year. They previously raised $1.4m from a diverse set of individual and institutional investors.
The Challenge
What founders struggle with before Metal
With the recent growth, the Company is ahead of industry benchmarks and is exploring raising a seed round. Max’s calendar has become increasingly busy, and his biggest challenge lies in bringing efficiency to the process of accessing the right investors.
As the company's fundraising efforts evolved, simply identifying investors was no longer enough. The team needed an efficient way to understand which existing relationships could lead to warm introductions, allowing them to prioritize outreach through trusted connections rather than relying on cold outreach.
Accessing Investors via Metal's Intro Paths
How Metal surfaces the right investors
With Metal, Max is able to integrate his Gmail and LinkedIn data sources, and plug in the names of his existing investors. Equipped with data on venture deals from the past 20 years, Metal is able to identify how Max’s existing investors can help him build access.
For each target investor, Max can quickly navigate to the “Intro Pathways” sub-tab, and view which of the portfolio companies of his existing investors have raised from the target investor. This way, he is able to identify who to ping for specific introductions, and is no longer socializing long lists of investors where he would like to get introductions.
In his own words, Max tells us that, "It's not just about identifying access points; instead, it is the context provided with each intro path that makes it super useful. Prior to Metal, I had to spend hours of manual research to build a fraction of this data in spreadsheets."
Impact on the Fundraising Process
How targeting the right investors changes outcomes
Pickleheads is building in a rapidly growing category and with a surging user base. This puts the Company in a uniquely favorable position to raise from investors that they choose to work with.
With Metal, Max is able to quickly orient himself around the right investors, and is able to build access where needed. For Max, this translates into the following key capabilities –
• Knowing exactly who to ask for specific introductions (along with the context of their relationship there)
• Spend more time engaging with investors that are “leaning in” and less bandwidth on getting access to the first call
• Focusing on the right investors and being able to eliminate those that do not lead seed rounds, or do not invest in consumer businesses, and/or haven’t invested in similar technologies before
Executive Summary
Key takeaways from Pickleheads' use of Metal
Pickleheads used Metal's network intelligence to uncover warm introduction pathways hidden within its existing investor network. By making these relationships immediately visible, the team was able to prioritize trusted introductions, reduce manual research, and focus more of its fundraising efforts on building meaningful investor relationships.
01
Building access via existing investors is quick and seamless with the right software tools
02
Portfolio companies of existing investors are often one of the best sources of intros
03
The greatest efficiency lever is to focus on investors that are empirically a strong fit
