Download The Full Strategy & Research Document
An idea for a fund from 2 operators turned into a credible brand & $10 million in LP commitments.
CLIENT
YEAR
CATEGORIES
• Finance
• Distribution
A real record.A public presence that read like a mailing list.
STORY & IMPACT
404 Fund's founders had spent years in private equity, investing in startups on the side, before leaving to build a venture fund of their own. When they came to us, the fund had a name and nothing else: no brand, no deck, no website.
We joined at the earliest stage a fund can be in, effectively as part of their own internal team, building the brand, the fundraising materials, and a volunteer program to help run the fund while it was still being built.
The Impact
They had already raised from the people who knew them personally, friends, family, their own network. What they didn't have yet was anything that would make an institutional LP, someone who had never met them, take the fund seriously enough to say yes, so we built the brand, deck, and website that let the founders make that case.
Over the partnership, 404 Fund raised around $10 million in commitments, genuine progress for a fund that started as a name. However, The fund had set its sights on a $50 million goal and did not close it in full. We're including that here on purpose: a credible brand opens the door, but closing a fund at that scale comes down to the depth of the institutional relationships behind it, and that's one of the clearest lessons we've carried into every fundraise partnership since.
SERVICES RENDERED
404 Fund had nothing built yet, so the brand had to do work no established fund needs from its identity i.e show, on sight, that two operators with no fund of their own to point to were serious enough for an institutional LP's time.
01 CORE BRAND KIT
03 · DISTRIBUTION ASSETS & APPLICATIONS
An institutional LP meeting 404 Fund for the first time had no track record and no recognizable name to go on. The deck and one-pagers we built had to make the case anyway, before the founders ever got a follow-up conversation.
04 · LP RELATIONSHIP & COMMS PARTNERSHIP
We helped the founders build the follow-up system every LP conversation needed: staying in touch after a first meeting and sending updates as the fund's story developed, so LPs kept moving instead of going cold after one pitch.
That system got the founders further than a brand alone could have & resulted in actual conversations, follow-through & $10 million in commitments.
Before this site existed, 404 Fund was a name and nothing else. It became the first genuine signal to an institutional LP that the fund was being built seriously, not assembled at the last minute for a pitch.
05 · WEBSITE DESIGN
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