Raising
DD Prep
Diligence doesn't kill deals with hard questions. It kills them with slow answers to easy ones.
The diligence checklist for your actual stage, kill-ordered. No cargo-cult data rooms.
What you get
- the list
- Every question a real due-diligence pass will ask, organized by kill-order.
- legal weight
- Flagged for your lawyer rather than answered for you. The easy questions you don't want to be caught flat-footed on.
Try it with real input
example input, real run“A solo pre-seed founder, SaaS for property managers, raising 750K on SAFEs with one term sheet expected next week. Incorporated through Clerky. Deck claims 4,200 waitlist signups and 12 design-partner agreements. A friend built the billing integration before incorporation; three angel SAFEs of 25K each already signed.”
One expected term sheet after a strong partner meeting means the standard list can arrive within days of it, and a term sheet expected is not a term sheet in hand, so treat this week as the preparation window. Your real exposure is not the Clerky paperwork, it is the billing integration a friend built before the...
see the full DD Prep run →For a sharper read
- include
- Your stage and what you're raising, or what you're being diligenced on. What you already have ready narrows the kill-order list.
FAQ
What do investors actually ask for in due diligence at pre-seed?
Less than founders fear and more than they usually have written down: a clean read on who owns the IP, whether a cap table reflects reality, and whether the numbers a deck claims match what a bank statement or Stripe dashboard shows. Full financial audits and formal compliance certifications are almost never a pre-seed ask.
Should I build a data room before I start raising?
Build the parts that are cheap and load-bearing, like confirming IP assignment and cleaning up your numbers. Skip the parts that are expensive and premature, like an audit or a formal compliance certification, until a specific investor or stage actually asks for them.
What happens if I discover a gap mid-raise?
Name it and fix or confirm it immediately rather than hoping it does not come up. A founder who says "we caught that and here is the fix" reads as in control. A founder who goes quiet for a week reads as unprepared, whether or not the underlying issue was serious.
of 385 identifiable VC-backed failures cited poor product-market fit.
CB Insights, The top 9 reasons startups fail, March 2026 · causes could overlap
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