Our Podcast Deal Flow Engine

May 31, 2022

For those who don’t know, Seedscout was founded on the back of a podcast called Forward Thinking Founders. FTF is a podcast I started in 2019 to see what would happen if we interviewed a ton of high potential founders who were just getting off the ground. Instead of interviewing the already successful, we interviewed those chasing success. You have have heard of some of the early guests. Of the fist 10 guests I interviewed in early 2019, that included:

Note a bad hit rate. But after my first dozen or two interviews, I wanted more. I wanted to take more risk. Interview people who were literally nobodies to the tech world who I thought could be somebodies. Complete outsiders. Could I accurately detect high potential founders before professionals who were paid six figures to do it first? Could a random internet citizen compete with almighty Silicon Valley VC class? Well, this post isn’t about that. It’s about explaining how I scout…for sport. And how you can benefit from it..greatly. Let’s look at the data of the first 800 podcast interviews so we can explain the Alpha.

The Dataset

Explaining The Data

What are you looking at here? The far left section is a list of the company names who’s founders we interviewed. To the right of that is the public fundraise number of the startup when we interviewed them on the podcast. Next to that is their current fundraise amount (Sometimes years after the initial podcast recording. Note, some of these could fundraise numbers be outdated. Then we have the date we interviewed the founder, or the “scouted” date. Then URL and sector.

This is ranked in order of what we feel is the most impressive scouting performance. This is a formula that takes into account the amount they raised when we interviewed them, the amount they raised now, and ranked for how early we scouted the best companies. In that first 36, you are reading that correctly. We scouted all of those companies before they publicly announced any capital raises.

Welcome To Your New Deal Flow Source

In short, we have amazing deal flow. And we put in on display every day via our RSS feed. We still interview founders on the FTF podcast to this day. In fact, we released an episode today. Every time we add a new episodes, we put that founder in our database and track them on Crunchbase. When they raise, we mark it and we see how they compare to every other scouted startup we have. We are always trying to beat our previous scouting records. Get to a new number one to beat out Trainual. Every time we interview a founder, we think there is potential that they could get to the top of the list.

If you’re looking for the best deal flow, you can look at Y Combinator demo day or stroll through Tech Twitter. But if I was you, I would track our RSS feed like a hawk. Your job isn’t to scout founders before us, it’s to scout founders before your competition. We are happy to be of service.

Things to Note About Our Process

  1. We use a podcast interview as a symbol of scouting because it proves we got access to a founders time

  2. We rely on Crunchbase fundraising data which we know is far from perfect

  3. We are always improving our process. We know that fundraise amount is not representative of “best companies” but it is a unifying metric we can use to track all the venture backed companies we interview