I started fundraising again for Shovels. Not because I need to -- because I want to. The process of fundraising and being fully transparent with my team throughout has revealed to me that this process, my process, is the way that I do most things. Seeing it reflected back to me in our #investors Discord channel has got me thinking more about my process.

My process is messy. I don’t mean disorganized; it’s organized to the tilt. I track every conversation, set reminders for myself, and keep a file on every VC and angel I’ve ever talked to. The messiness is shown in the evolution of my strategy. I let myself get excited about new ideas that come up in conversation. I allow myself to be impressed by the founders of these venture capital firms and feel lucky to have their attention. I want to be persuaded that their vision for my company is superior to my own.

As a result, I swing. I go from here to there based on the last conversation I had. We’re a data company, no, we’re a software company, actually, we’re both! My fully-remote team and I meet for an hour twice a week and I relay my thinking in near real-time. For them it’s like a soap opera, new characters entering and leaving the stage, falling in love, breaking up. I post notes like journal entries for myself and my team on the Discord channel almost every day.

I know this is unusual. Most CEOs don’t do this, even when the team is very small. I do it because my team was originally against the fundraise and, as it turns out, they might have been right.

We have the opportunity to become profitable and never fundraise again – why not do that? It sounds great, sure, but being profitable is not my goal. I want the option to be profitable, but I don’t necessarily want to exercise that option. I’d rather grow fast. Fast growth, market share, and rapid innovation are a stronger strategy than burn minimization.

What I'm finding, though, is that it's a lot easier to fundraise when the path is set. We have product-market fit and we can prove it by the demand we're seeing for our products. When we first launched, making product was easy and making sales was hard. All of a sudden, making sales is easy and making product keep up with all the sales is hard.

The job of the CEO is to not run out of money. Outside of that, I think my job as CEO is to keep my team invested, and rather than tell my teammates what to believe, I’d rather show them. Being so transparent about the fundraise and the evolution of my thinking is my way of showing them how rich our opportunities are.

So many things to do! And look, we can get smart finance people to give us money to do them!

So as I scroll back in time over the last eight weeks I see how much has changed over the course of this fundraise process. I’m learning as I go and trying to find patterns in the reactions of the people I’m pitching. I’m also paying attention to how I feel as I go through the motions. I’m finding what resonates and what falls flat. I’m digesting the feedback even when it’s hard and trying to decide how much weight to put on a negative reaction. Even when I don’t know, I paste the whole rejection email into the #investors channel. I want my team to see it too.

Eventually I will have seen enough. I’ll have looked at all sides and taken my own perspective from doing this for nearly two years and I’ll make a decision about our fundraise and what Shovels will be two years from now.

I’ll run my process by getting my hands dirty and sharing it with my team.

It’s the only way I know how to do it.