About
I raised badly three times so you can do it once, properly.
YourFirstRaise is run by Yoann Defay with a small crew of operators. One founder does your work, start to finish. No junior analyst, no template with your logo dropped in.
Track record
Both chairs, in that order.
Left École Centrale
Walked out of engineering school to start my first company, which taught me most of what I know about raising badly.
Built 25+ products
Affiliate, media buying, SaaS, fintech, Web3 and AI. Some worked. The ones that did not taught me what investors were seeing that I was not.
Raised my own pre-seed
Three times, from the founder chair, with the cold outreach and the polite passes that come with it.
Ran EarlyVentures
An early-stage launchpad. I read the decks, sat in the reviews and said no far more often than yes. That is where the pattern became obvious.
“I watched founders with real companies lose rounds to founders with better slides. That gap is fixable in about a week, and almost nobody tells you so.”
Yoann Defay · on why this exists
How we work
A small number of founders at a time, so nobody gets a template.
A cap, on purpose
We work with a small number of founders at a time. Past that, decks start getting written by someone who has not spoken to you.
Written from zero
Every deck is written from your material. Every outreach list is researched before a message leaves. Nothing is recycled from the last client.
The first call is free
30 minutes. If we can help, we show you where to start. If raising now would burn your list, that is what you hear instead.
What we believe about raising
Three things we will repeat until you are tired of them.
The deck buys the meeting. The room closes the round.
Most first-time founders over-build the deck and under-prepare for the conversation it earns them. We prepare you for both, and we drill the second one harder.
Raise when the company is ready, not when the calendar is.
An early raise costs you your best investor names, because most of them will not look twice. If that is where you are, the fit call ends with "wait a quarter" and a list of what to fix first.
You should never be the one doing the writing.
Advice that ends in a task list is advice you now have to execute alone at 1am. We write the deck, research the list and send the emails. You supply facts and decisions.
Tell me where the raise is stuck.
30 minutes, free, no deck required. You leave with what is missing and whether I am the right person to fix it.
no deck needed