6 July 2022 | Newsletter

Welcome to The Fight for Fairer Funding newsletter where we share the latest in the fight for fairer funding in investment, raise awareness and provide education in line with our Mission. This newsletter from Funding Focus founder, David B. Horne, is part of the platform that sheds light on the uneven playing field that female and under-represented entrepreneurs of all genders face when it comes to raising capital for their businesses. We hope you enjoy it!

Read our latest edition below.

Sometimes it’s the thing you never thought about that hits you the hardest when you see it right in front of your eyes. In this case, it hit me in a good way.

Since my second book, Funded Female Founders was published — 2 weeks ago today! — several of my contacts have reached out and said words to the effect of: “Congratulations, you’re now a serial author.”

I had never really thought about it before, but it’s true. Then one of them sent me this photograph, and it really started to sink in.

When you first publish a book, you can sometimes get a bit obsessive-compulsive about checking the rankings on Amazon. I certainly do! After checking nearly hourly in the first few days, I soon remembered that Amazon doesn’t update the rankings in real-time. They seem to do it 4 or 5 times a day, and so the OCD behaviour waned a little. But I still found myself checking it every few hours, just to see how the new book was getting on.

The main category Amazon has for my books is Venture Capital. It’s a tough one to crack and ever since Add then Multiply was published in 2019, it has been dominated by two books: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Measure What Matters by John Doerr. I’ve read them both and they are excellent books, as evidenced by the 10,151 and 5,172 reviews (at the time of writing this), respectively. More recently, The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby has joined them. These three books in their various forms (paperback, hardcover, Kindle and audio) have consistently dominated the top 10 spots in the Venture Capital category since January.

With that in mind, I was delighted that Funded Female Founders made it to number 6 in the rankings last week. You can see those other three books have locked up the top five spots in the photo, plus two more in the top 10. One could argue that Funded Female Founders made it to number 4, since only three books ranked higher.

The other thing which was really cool was seeing both of my books in the Top 50, with Add then Multiply at number 28 and Funded Female Founders at number 41 earlier this week. Later that same day they had reversed, with Funded Female Founders rising to number 8 and Add then Multiply to 43 (but I forgot to take a screenshot so no photo).

So what does this mean for the future? Are there more books to come or will I settle on two?

For now, I’m going to let these two run. Funded Female Founders is the manifesto for the fund which I’m in process of launching: Funding Focus Investment Trust plc. You’ve probably read about it in my social feeds, but in case you missed it, here is the announcement we made back in March. Things are moving forward and we hope to make another announcement in the autumn.

Having said that, there are a couple of other book ideas bubbling round in the back of my mind. I’ll let them bubble away for now. Writing a book is a significant undertaking. It’s also quite an addictive thing, and I have to say that I’m hooked. Watch this space!

If you haven’t yet read either of my books, please go to your local Amazon site and type “David B Horne” into the search bar. You’ll find them both there. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Until next time…

With love and gratitude,

David

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