How Unify booked 885 meetings and generated $24.8M in pipeline from our $40M Series B announcement

Our (updated) playbook for announcing a fundraise

On July 15, we announced our Series B, and it made a splash - we generated 885 meetings booked and $25M of new pipeline in July. Beyond the pipeline, the Series B gave us a new level of credibility that's translating into more closed revenue.

Before breaking down our Series B playbook, let's rewind a bit.

We first saw promise in using fundraise announcements to drive pipeline back when we announced our Seed round in January 2024. I’d seen some success from posting on Twitter and LinkedIn in the past and had a hypothesis that we’d be able to make a big splash with the fundraise.

We published the announcement on both Twitter and LinkedIn. Both went semi-viral in our corner of the internet. We saw 420 inbound demo requests in the 48 hours after the announcement.

We had signal that this playbook worked. So we put even more energy into making a splash with our Series A in October of 2024. This time, we were even more intentional, spending the 3 months prior to the announcement orchestrating a product launch, social content, and press coverage.

The outcome: millions of social impressions--and more importantly, $6.6M in pipeline generated.

When it came time to announce our $40M Series B last week, we wanted to take this a step further.

So far, it's paid off, bringing in 885 meetings booked and $24.8M in pipeline (and counting) in July.

The Series B Announcement

Similar to the A round, the team and I spent months planning the campaign.

Here's everything that went into planning our Series B announcement campaign; use it as inspiration for your own fundraise announcement.

1) Launching a new product: Unify for Reps.

We specifically timed up this product launch to be about 2 weeks before the fundraise announcement. This was intentional, as we wanted to tweak the narrative around what Unify is and our core target personas before the announcement went live.

This put us in a position to have the website fully refreshed long before the fundraise. So, customers wouldn't have the figure out what the product does at the same time as the announcement.

In October, we announced our fundraise and launched 'Unify 2.0' concurrently. Being honest, this wasn't the best way to do it. It was too much for prospects to digest on one day. The staggered approach worked better this time around.

As a side benefit, we saw distinct spikes in meetings booked from the product launch and the fundraise announcement, versus lumping them together.

We also worked with Ellis Hamburger over the span of a few months ahead of launch to revamp the Unify manifesto, mission statement, and more.

 Along with this project, we refreshed the home page with a new demo video, a new Navattic demo, and added new case studies (like Perplexity).

(2) Getting press coverage.

Confession: Securing mainstream press coverage for the Series B was harder than I wanted it to be.

Reality is, if you want to get into 'mainstream' publications, most PR consultants tell you you need to raise $100M+ to be interesting.

We ended up linking up with Alex Konrad for the exclusive on our Series B. Alex is a legend from Forbes who's since gone on to found Upstarts Media. It was so refreshing to work with Alex. He wanted to understand us as a founding team, our journey, and what we care about.

Stoked about the story ended up with - check it out here.

Beyond the exclusive piece, we followed on with a few supporting pieces which helped amplify our story.

We went on TBPN to talk about our AI product strategy. And we did some supporting pieces in The Signal and the Go To Market Fund. I'd highly recommend going after multiple publications that cater to your specific audience.

(3) We spent $13,954 on Cameos from B-List celebrities.

We always try to pair the traditional press of a fundraise announcement with a creative campaign.

For our Series A, we ran our Unify Happy Meals campaign, where we sent Unify-branded happy meal boxes to customers and prospects all over SF and NYC.

We wanted to delight our customers and make it fun for them to post about us on social. We also wanted to do it on a shoestring budget to force us to be more creative.

We thought of this idea of “B-list celebrities for the series B” and ran with it.

In total Peter crafted 23 personalized Cameos from people like Kevin O’Leary, Chris Diamontopoulos (Tres Coma Guy), and Bruce Buffer. 17 of these were shared organically on LinkedIn and X.

(4) LinkedIn & X Announcements.

A fundraise announcement is a unique opportunity to create an echo chamber on social.

And you only have a set amount of these chances. You don't fundraise every month.

Our whole team used this as an opportunity to share personal stories about why we’re excited to be building Unify. That, plus organic shares from customers, investors, and our network, amplified the impact.

(Full details on how to execute this strategy down below...)

(5) Automated outbound spike.

During the Series B announcement, we had Unify working in the background to send automated outbound based on intent signals, primarily coming from our website (docs) and from LinkedIn (docs).

When you have a major announcement like this, you'll naturally get a ton of social engagement and traffic to your site. But many of those folks won't book a demo on their own. Automated outbound is our best way to re-target this interest

Important note here: we also cast as many lines in the water as we could before the announcement, so they could capitalize on the bump.

We also went after a ton of Closed Lost opportunities that we now had a bunch more features and functionalities for.

We booked 149 meetings via automated outbound in July, primarily from capitalizing on the buzz we created on social.

Deep Dive: Social (LinkedIn & X) Content Strategy

We created a social echo chamber on LinkedIn and X around our Series A announcement. Social was the core strategy that helped us book 885 meetings in July.

The playbook we ran had 3 phases: before, during, and after the announcement.

Before announcement:

3 weeks before the Series B launch, we asked our 50-person team to spend 1-2 hours thinking + writing a social post.

We encouraged personal and authentic stories that would resonate with each person’s respective audiences. We importantly did not give any canned company messaging to say. Throw that all away.

Here are a few examples of content from the team that crushed:

Adara continued her "day XXX at a hyper-growth startup series" and used a post to amplify the Series B announcement. She also included the video she produced for the announcement.

Peter shared his unique story of going from the 12th Unify customer to joining our Growth team a year later—along with a 10/10 meme

Anthony used his post to share his story of building the Revenue team over the past year, and helping us scale from six-figure ARR to the mid-seven-figures (eight soon 😉).

Notice how each of these content assets is unique to the team member. Their individual narratives are so much more compelling than canned, copy-paste content. Yes, it takes more time to prepare--but in our experience, the play is worth the effort.

I haven’t counted the impression numbers, but these posts all did insanely well.

As I mentioned, we had the Cameo videos go live on the same day as the fundraise as well.

The big learning there was to make it attractive for people in-network to help amplify your announcement. The Cameos were funny and delighted the recipients, so they felt excited to post them on our behalf.

The flood of B-list celeb videos contributed to the echo chamber we were going for on LinkedIn and X during announcement day.

One important call-out for social strategy: Coordination of your team and investors pre-announcement matters.

A few days before the announcement, we emailed our investors and let them know about the social push and how they could help. We also sent calendar invites the day before, so no one would forget 😁 

Here's the email I used. Feel free to use it as a template.

Engagement on the announcement post—especially in the first 30-60min after it goes live—has a big impact on the performance of the content. So, make it as easy and low-friction as possible for people to engage. Be proactive in letting them know what and when to post.

As a new addition with the Series B announcement, Rhea built a dedicated page on our site with links to all our social posts for the day, making it as easy as possible for supporters to engage with our content.

We also incentivized this engagement with swag giveaways

I'm repeating myself, but it’s important... make it easy and attractive for people to amplify your announcement.

Announcement day:

The morning of the announcement, we had a team-wide calendar invite for when our posts would go live. We were on a Zoom together in case any snags came up (which some always do).

Our Upstart exclusive dropped at 7:30am PST. 30 minutes later, at 8am, all of our posts went out on LinkedIn and X.

Then our whole team began feverishly amplifying each other's posts.

The inbounds started to roll in.

Every few minutes, our #website-demo-booked Slack channel would go off. It was exhilarating.

One pro-tip I learned from Tommy Clark at Compound is to repost on your own LI post later the same day, 6 hrs after the original post is published. You can get more juice out of one post this way. Sometimes, your followers will even get an alert that you reposted. The little things add up.

Another strategy we tried this time around for the Series B is treating the fundraise announcement kind of like a lead magnet post—you know, the posts that go "Comment X for Y." I saw Dara from Delphi execute this well, and was inspired to try the play in our own announcement post.

Our CTA was to comment 'GROWTH' and we'll add you to our self-serve waitlist.

(BTW - reply to this newsletter and I'll add you. Unify self-serve is dropping soon!)

I'm not sure how replicable this part of the playbook is, but Unify did also ratio one of the best sh*tposters on X from our brand account. So that was fun (we're friends, I swear 😬)

48 hours after announcement:

Something we learned back during our Series A announcement — there’s a halo effect post-fundraise where everyone is excited about you and your vision. We wanted to ride that wave of excitement as long as possible.

Here are the follow-on posts I made in the post-announcement window:

1. A results recap 48 hours after announcement (37,000 impressions, 451 likes)

2. A 'we're hiring' post to capitalize on the fundraise momentum (30,000 impressions, 247 likes)

3. A recap of our Cameo marketing play (10,000 impressions, 100 likes)

Don’t just make one “hey, we raised” post and let the moment pass. Ride the wave as long as you can.