What it took to raise money at 24...

A thread written on popular request! Raising money is never easy, and it’s not just about competence. It’s about convincing people to trust you - which is hard, and much harder when you are 24, and have never lived in India.

I am by no means an expert on it (in fact sales is still an important part of my role and I am constantly learning!) but these are some of the learnings from the early years of Forefront that I found helped us in our journey.

Have something different to say. Why would anyone come to you for the same thing they can find with an established brand! For us that was quant investing at that time, as well as niche product ideas that not many established houses offered. People will at least listen to you.

Speak with conviction and don’t be scared to have a point of view. Nobody buys a product - they buy the manager’s conviction. A lot of people later told me the fact that we left fancy jobs to start Forefront and took no salary spoke to them more than anything else.

Work with high quality vendors. Be regulated. The best decisions we took. It’s a business of money - check all the boxes regulation asks to demonstrate trust. It goes a long way when you yourself are new. It shows you know about the business beyond picking stocks.

In fact one of our biggest assets then was we built one of the best in class tech systems for PMS reporting rather than buying the off the shelf ones. Well before SEBI regulated perf fees, we wrote pages of manifestos on how we charged performance fees.

Client service and communication is an edge, so go out of the way to excel in it. Being accessible when a client has an issue helped. They knew even if a statement was wrong, they were talking to a founder who would make sure issues would be fixed.

Write, speak and build a brand. I got this advice from a market veteran on how important it is to be visible in a cluttered industry. We used online portals to write articles, networked with journalists on LinkedIn, and even showed up on TV to share views. No PR agency.

It was just randomly finding our way, with one thing leading to another. This is much easier today with social media when blogs, tweets, and YouTube give you a platform to share your competence...without a big marketing budget. My first external client came from an online post.

Accept mistakes quickly. We definitely made a lot of them. The best thing is to admit to it and apologise and most clients will genuinely forgive you. Deliver bad news first rather than hiding it - it has to come out in any case.

Meet a lot of people. We used every connection we had and everyone has some - friends, family, friends of family, alumni networks, and anything under the sun. You will get rejected 95 percent of the times. So it’s a good idea to widen your sample size of potential clients.

A smart advisory board helps. Build it with people who have credibility, who care about you and who have time for you. They can be people inside or outside the industry. Our advisory board members enriched us in terms of values, and connected us to people who helped us.

Have no ego. My former partner said once take your ego and put it in a glass of water. Then throw the glass of water on the floor and walk over it. No client is too small, and no client problem is too small. I have seen 10L clients grow into 100 cr clients.

Finally raising money is tough. Keeping it even tougher. Having started from scratch, and seen the pain of raising 10L, the PMS minimum then, I still get upset with redemptions... even though the business is 44,000 crores.

Sales as a skill in life and in the AMC industry is very underrated. We largely celebrate nerds. Forefront forced the arrogant investment professional to have to learn sales - brick by brick - and in that sense, it’s the richest work experience I have had...despite no salary :)