Investor-readiness · flat fee · no success fees

Before you raise, find out what an investor will find first.

The gaps that stall a round are the ones you can't see from the inside — and a partner finds them in the first meeting. That's true whether you haven't spoken to a single investor yet, you're weeks from your first call, or you're already mid-diligence.

Below is the exact rubric they diligence against: 25 stage-weighted items (fewer apply at each stage — 23 at seed, for example), scored live as you tick. The paid report then turns your gaps into a work order and writes the sections investors read first.

Built by practitioners who took a deep-tech company public end to end and raised $50M+ across financings. It's the prep work behind those raises, done for you and priced for a startup.

Your readiness, scored on this page

Pick your stage, answer honestly. Tap any underlined term for a plain-English definition. This checker runs entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere unless you submit the email box or the order form yourself.

First time raising? Start here →
You don't need to know the jargon going in — that's the whole point. Here's how this works and what you get out of it, even if half these terms are new:
  • Only tick what you're sure you already have. Anything you don't recognize, leave unchecked — there's no penalty for not knowing a term yet.
  • Every unchecked item becomes a plain-English gap in the box at the bottom, worst first — e.g. "🔴 Clean cap table — investors need to see exactly who owns what before they can price the round." That plain-language gap list is the value; you can read it without ticking a single box.
  • Tap any dotted term for a one-line definition. Ticking honestly beats ticking to look ready — the gaps are what you're here to find.
Tick items to see your grade against what investors expect at your stage.
Request the $990 report (no card yet — form first)
We'll reply with your gap list and a 1-page readiness checklist — sent by a human, usually same day.

Why this exists

The middle of this market is empty. That's your problem and our product.

Free checklists don't do the work

YC, a16z and Cooley publish excellent diligence lists — we built on them, openly. But a checklist doesn't score your company, research your market, or tell you what to fix first. That assembly labor runs 40–120 hours, mid-raise.

CFO retainers are the wrong shape

Fractional CFOs do this well — inside $5,000–$15,000/month fundraise-window retainers and "investor-ready in 90 days" programs. Right product, wrong price and timeline for a founder who needs the answer this week.

Free scores stop at the score

AI deck graders are free now, and fine. What none of them ship: a prioritized work order, sourced bottom-up market math, your comparable rounds, and a human who has closed real rounds on your readout call.

What arrives

Sixteen sections — 60–80 pages, shaped like the memo an IC writes about you. Every figure sourced.

1 · Your IC memo, written for you

The thesis paragraph a partner must write to get your deal through committee — the strongest honest version, with the missing evidence flagged. (An IC memo is the internal write-up a partner uses to convince their firm to invest.)

2 · Gap analysis

Your 25-item assessment with deal-breakers flagged — each gap mapped to the exact artifact investors expect, and why they ask.

3 · Your metrics vs. the bar

ARR, growth, burn multiple, NDR, CAC payback, Rule of 40 — scored 🟢🟡🔴 against the stage benchmark an IC cites (Bessemer, ICONIQ, Carta). AI-native judged on the AI bar, not the SaaS one. The exact benchmark sources per metric are listed on the methodology page, and each bar in your report names the report it comes from. (Burn multiple = dollars burned per new dollar of revenue; NDR = how much existing customers grow spend; Rule of 40 = growth % + profit margin % clearing 40. New to these? The report defines each next to your number.)

4 · Remediation work order

Fixes ordered by severity with realistic time estimates. Deal-breakers first. Hand it to your team as-is.

5 · Financial model, built from your numbers

Bear/base/bull ARR scenarios against the next-stage bar, runway and burn math, your SAFE stack converted at 3 valuations, use-of-funds with hiring plan, and the dilution waterfall — every assumption printed.

6 · Bottom-up market sizing

Units × price × attainable share, with numbered sources — the math investors respect, not the "$40B (Gartner)" slide they skip.

7 · Competitor landscape

Including the uncomfortable rows: incumbents, DIY, do-nothing. Omitting a competitor an investor knows is worse than any competitor's existence.

8 · Risks & mitigants

The section every partner writes anyway — written first, in your favor, with the honest counter to each risk.

9 · Round economics

Median round size, post-money, dilution, SAFE cap, and graduation odds for your stage (Carta / PitchBook) — so you anchor the valuation instead of the investor setting it.

10 · Comparable rounds

Who raised what, at your stage, in your category, 2024–2026, with the valuation methodology investors will apply — researched live for you.

11 · Deck, slide by slide

The funded-deck sequence with the investor question behind every slide, the DocSend attention each gets (~3m44s total), the failure that kills it — then your specifics written in.

12 · Data room blueprint

Nine numbered folders from an IPO-grade room, marked ✓ have / ✗ missing from your answers, in the order to build it.

13 · Diligence Q&A prep

The 12 hardest questions partners will ask your company, each with the answer structure: lead with the strongest fact, name the number, never bluff.

14 · The raise process, week by week

From work order to term sheet in ~12 weeks — list building, warm-intro mapping, clustered partner meetings, and the 3 momentum killers.

15 · Investor update template

The 6-block monthly update investors expect, pre-filled with your metrics — because how you report is itself diligenced.

16 · Appendix

The full rubric item by item, ✓/✗, so your counsel or CFO can audit coverage at a glance.

Read a complete sample report →

Section 12 · The data room, solved

A folder-by-folder blueprint from rooms that closed an IPO.

Your report ends with a data room blueprint generalized from the institutional rooms behind a company IPO and $50M+ of financings — nine numbered folders, every document named, trimmed to your stage, with ✓/✗ marked from your own checklist answers. You build it by filling in the ✗s, in order.

📁 00. Core Documents — deck (send version) ✓ · forwardable blurb ✗ · operating summary ✓
📁 01. Business & Traction — metrics export ✗ · pipeline & LOIs ✓
📁 02. Finance — monthly P&L ✓ · 3-yr driver model ✓ · unit economics ✗
📁 03. Equity — cap table ✓ · SAFE summary ✗ · ESOP ✗
📁 04. Product — demo access ✓ · product overview ✓
📁 05. Market Intelligence — sizing §3 · landscape §4 · comps §5 (this report fills the whole folder)
📁 06. Team — bios ✓ · hiring plan ✗   📁 07. Legal — incorporation ✓ · CIIA ✗   📁 08. IP — schedule ✓

Illustrative seed-stage excerpt — yours is generated from your answers. Note folder 05: sections 3–5 of the report are written to be dropped into your room as-is.

Who's behind this

Prepared by someone who has sat on both sides of the table.

IR & corporate-development practitioners

An IR & corporate-development practitioner — investor relations and corporate development. Took a deep-tech company public through a full exchange listing process, end to end (a diligence bar above any venture round), raised $50M+ across financings, now building AI-operated research systems in the San Francisco ecosystem.

RaiseReady exists because the preparation that closed those rounds — the data room, the sourced market math, the comps sheet, the narrative — is 80% systematizable. The remaining 20% is judgment, which is what the readout call is for. The data room blueprint in every report is generalized from the actual institutional rooms behind those raises.

Why no name and headshot on this page? Naming an individual next to specific past deals risks identifying companies and financings that are still confidential — so the name stays off the public page, but not from you. Ask and you get it: email inha.journey@gmail.com and the practitioner shares their real name and LinkedIn privately, signs a mutual NDA before you send any numbers, and — on the working-session tier — gets on a live call with you. You never hand a cap table or burn rate to an anonymous inbox.

And you can check the work before you ever email. The full scoring rubric is public on the methodology page, and a complete sample report shows the exact depth you get — its market figures cited to live public sources (Census, an S-1, Carta) you can open and verify right now. Judge the method, not the résumé.

Flat fee, no success fees, no securities activity, refund if late — the structure that lets the report tell you the truth about your gaps.

Pricing

Flat. No retainer, no success fee, no equity.

How ordering works — and how long it takes: there's no card checkout on the site yet, so the button opens a short form. You get a Stripe payment link back by email within one business day (usually same day), pay by card, and the researched report lands within 24 hours after that. Request to report is 1 business day + 24 hours at the outside, often much faster; miss the 24-hour window and you're fully refunded.

Card in hand and want to skip the wait? Email inha.journey@gmail.com with your company and stage (or submit the form and reply "ready to pay now") and we'll send the Stripe link the same working hour when we're at our desks — that collapses the front half of the timeline to the report's own 24-hour turn. The one-business-day figure is the outer bound for the async path, not a queue you're forced to sit in.

Readiness Report

$990 one-time

  • All sixteen sections, researched and computed for your company
  • Stage-weighted gap analysis + work order
  • Every figure with a numbered source
  • 20-minute readout call included
  • Delivered within 24 hours of payment, or fully refunded (payment link usually same day — see full timeline above)
Start intake — form first, no card yet

Report + Working Session

$1,990 one-time

  • Everything in the Report
  • 45-minute working session with the practitioner behind the report: deck-narrative surgery + data-room walkthrough
  • Forwardable intro blurb, written with you
  • One follow-up review of your revised materials
Start intake — form first, no card yet

Readout calls and working sessions are scheduled by reply to your delivery email — you send two time windows and we confirm. Capacity is deliberately limited so every call is with the practitioner behind your report, not a handoff; if a week is full we'll tell you the next opening up front.

A person reads your intake to confirm scope (stage, model, what to research) before you pay, so the report is built for your company, not run off a template — then you pay a real Stripe link with a refund behind it.

Context: fundraising consultants run $5,000–$50,000/month retainers or 3–8% success fees (the latter carries SEC broker-dealer risk for you, not just them). A deck agency alone is $2,000–$6,000. We're the flat-fee diligence-prep layer under all of it. Cross-border founders (Korea→US) welcome — bilingual materials on request.

Straight talk

Who this is not for

  • Founders looking for investor introductions — we prepare, we don't broker. No success fees, no securities activity. That independence is why the report can be honest (and why you avoid the unregistered-finder problem that can poison a round).
  • Companies with a fractional CFO already running diligence prep — you're covered; don't pay twice. Run the free check above to verify, and keep the $990.
  • Anyone expecting a guarantee of funding — nobody honest can promise that. We guarantee the preparation: on time, sourced, specific — or refunded.

Questions

The skeptical-founder FAQ

Why not just use the free YC / a16z checklists?

Use them — our rubric is built on them and says so. What they don't do: score your specific situation, prioritize with time estimates, research your market with sources, or map your comps. That labor is what stalls founders mid-raise, and what CFO firms charge $5–15K/month to absorb.

Who's behind this, and why is there no name?

An IR and corporate-development practitioner who took a deep-tech company public through a full exchange-listing process and raised $50M+ across financings — now building AI-operated research systems solo, in public.

The anonymity is deliberate, not evasion. Naming an individual next to specific past deals risks identifying companies and financings that are still confidential. So the site is built so you don't have to take a résumé on faith: the scoring rubric is fully public, and the sample report's market figures are cited to live public sources (Census, an S-1, Carta) you can open and check right now.

Want a human first? Email inha.journey@gmail.com — the working-session tier is a live call with the practitioner who wrote your report. Before you share sensitive numbers, ask: we'll sign a mutual NDA and share their real name and LinkedIn privately by email. The name is kept off this public page, not from you.

How is the research trustworthy?

Every figure in sections 3–5 carries a numbered source you verify before it goes in front of investors.

The check is mechanical, not a promise. Before a report is sent, a script scans the researched sections and flags any numeric claim not paired with a resolvable citation link. A report with an unresolved flag doesn't auto-send — it stops for a human to source the number or cut it. It's a plain lint-style gate, not magic; the point is that "we forgot to source that" can't silently ship.

Inspect exactly how strict this is in the sample report: the market figures drawn from public data (Census, Toast's S-1, Carta) are live, clickable links you can open and check right now.

Can AI really do this?

The scoring is rules, not AI. The research is web-grounded with citations. The synthesis is AI-drafted and QC-gated, with a human practitioner on your readout call. That division of labor — machine for assembly, human for judgment — is exactly how we'd staff it at 10x the price.

We're pre-seed / pre-revenue with few metrics. Do we get a thinner report for the same price?

No — the price is flat because the work is. At pre-seed the financial-model and metrics sections lean on scenarios, comparable rounds, and the bar you'll need to clear, rather than a revenue history you don't have yet. But the market sizing, competitor map, IC-memo narrative, data-room blueprint, and gap work order are the same depth — often more useful earlier, since there's more to fix.

The sample is a seed company with revenue precisely so you can see the fullest version; an earlier-stage report shifts weight toward strategy and readiness, not page count. If your situation genuinely doesn't fit a $990 report, we'll say so before you pay rather than sell you boilerplate.

How can a bespoke report be truthfully "24 hours"?

Because most of it is assembly, not invention. The scoring is a fixed rubric run against your answers; the market sizing, comps, and round economics are researched from public sources on a known method; the narrative and financial model are drafted from the numbers you provide. That's hours of focused machine-plus-human work, not weeks — the 24-hour window is the honest turnaround for that scope, and if we miss it you're fully refunded. It's not a fill-in-the-blanks template: two companies at the same stage get different gap orders, different comps, and different risk framing because the inputs differ.

We're a Korean startup raising from US investors. Does this work for us?

That's home turf for the team — cross-border IR is where this practice started. Materials can be prepared bilingually, and the working session covers the expectations gap between Korean and US investors.

How does ordering and payment work?

Requesting the report starts a short intake — not an instant checkout yet. A human replies within one business day (usually same day) with a Stripe payment link and next steps; your gap summary rides along.

You pay by card through Stripe. Nothing is charged on the intake form, and no money moves off a plain email reply. Once you pay, the researched report follows within 24 hours (usually much sooner) — then reply to book your readout call.

Late? Reply "refund" and it's processed within one business day. No retention flow.