Hey all! My name is Andrew Chan, and I am a senior associate at Builders VC, an early-stage venture fund based in San Francisco. I’m thrilled to be an investor in Harmonic and am an avid user; I’ve been on the platform for almost a year now starting when I was working at Riot Ventures in LA.
Today, I want to talk about one of the workflows that we set up at Riot using Harmonic: Harmonic as a CRM.
You might be thinking to yourself: -“now Andrew, why would our organization use Harmonic as a CRM? We’re already paying $XYZ too many dollars/person/month to use Affinity or HubSpot or one of the countless VC CRMs that everybody is still woefully unsatisfied with.” I’d ask you in return: why not? At Riot we had Affinity set up as our primary CRM, but using Harmonic as a CRM in addition allowed us to easily track and source leads simultaneously. Here’s how:
The Workflow
At Riot we used five watchlists in conjunction with one well-refined search. The latter was a daily-updating saved search purpose-built for companies relevant to our VC. We would log on every morning and check for new companies. As soon as one person viewed a company, they would move it to the “checked” watchlist, that way none of us would redundantly evaluate the same company.
From the “checked” watchlist, if we were interested in a company, we would move it to the “outreach” list., That was our signal to send a LinkedIn message or an email to the founder(s), and move the company to the “outreach completed” list.
Finally, once we had a call with the founder, we would move the company to a “completed” list and port the company to Affinity with call notes.
The Advantage
The key advantage to using Harmonic as a CRM is that it allows for segmentation and easy analysis of deals sourced via the engine. As deal flow becomes increasingly democratized, it is increasingly important for firms to track the origins of leads so that they and their stakeholders can understand the repeatability of their deal process. For us, tracking Harmonic’s deals directly in the platform was not only more efficient than porting every deal to an external CRM, but it allowed us to easily monitor metrics pertaining to which deals came from Harmonic and the quality therein.
Conclusion
Do I think Harmonic should be your main CRM? Probably not. But you know, if you’re a micro-VC strapped for cash, maybe it’s not so bad of an option. There’s are a lot of different ways to get value out of the platform, and that’s one of the many reasons I continue recommending Harmonic to my colleagues and one of the reasons we’re thrilled to join this journey as investors.
Hope you enjoyed learning about our workflow using Harmonic as a CRM! If you have any questions about this Harmonic workflow or are a founder and want to learn more about Builders VC, feel free to shoot me an email me at andrew@builders.vc
You can request access to Harmonic here.
Until next time,
Andrew
