LP Blueprint
Tell us your raise. We'll tell you the 3 things to do today. LP Blueprint's a personal fundraising assistant for GPs: your site, your pipeline, and the LPs most likely to close. More then 300 GPs and investors have paid for LP Blueprint.
- Top in Finance
- #36
- Subscribers
- 118K
- Paid subscribers
- 10+ paid
- Followers
- 121K
- Paid plan
- $20/mo
- Recommends
- 6
- Podcast
- Yes
rounded by Substack
other newsletters
What they write about
Practical guidance for emerging fund managers raising capital from limited partners, mixed with running satire. Recurring subjects include family offices and allocators, investment committee dynamics, data rooms and fundraising materials, and what raising a fund actually costs.
- fundraising
- venture capital
- limited partners
- family offices
- fund management
Recent examples: SPVs are going buck wild · Getting Your Founders Funded, Again, And Again
Written from LP Blueprint’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
118K on Sep 10, 2026 → 118K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #36 today · #44 a week ago · #32 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 42 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 7%
- Best rank seen
- #29
- Rank, 7 days
- +8 places
- Rank, 30 days
- −4 places
- Followers added
- −372
- Posts
- 10
- Reactions per post
- 87
- Reactions tracked
- 2.1K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 14, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 24 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: Who’s On The IC? None of Your Business 😂 — 210 reactions on Sep 8, 2026.
Recent posts
- SPVs are going buck wild
I sit in my ivory tower all day listening to Blue Öyster Cult and Mastdon on repeat. In fact, I saw Mastodon and Deafheaven at the Fox in Oakland last Friday, it was insane. The little comic book monkeys they used on their stage backdrop were wild, and they even brought out Baronness’ John Baizley for 4-5 songs. I command an army of robots to monitor the market for me all night and all day. This isn’t because I’m super-smart, it’s because I’m super-lazy and I advise 135+ investment firms. They also do not like to do homework. They like to meet with LPs. So, we need to know at all times what’s…
- Getting Your Founders Funded, Again, And Again
I love talking with smart women who know how to get founders funded. And I love talking with some of the best writers on Substack. Helena Fogarty checks both of those boxes. Her Substack, The Phenom Brief , has been going now for a year, and she covers some of the hardest material I know - how founders get funded, past the first time. That’s what today’s interview covers. If you pass ONE piece of LP Blueprint stuff onto your founders (if you back startups) this is probably the one. We’ve broken the piece down into sections. Also, if you’re not a paid subscriber, don’t trip out, feel free to…
- The 3 bank products emerging VCs use
If you’re in this business long enough, somebody from a bank may call you. There is no bank promo BS in this post either. We’re just here to make sure your fund or SPV gets closed, and sometimes that means referring you to a good banker, attorney, etc., to smooth out bumps along the way. I’m just gonna put this here. We get 2-3 questions every single day on “What should my fundraise cost?” We’re not even gonna gatekeep this document anymore. A fundraise costs about 3%. I don’t know if you know this but if you incorporate a fund with the SEC someone from Pitchbook will call you within about 7…
- LinkedIn Shut Off The AI Slop Button
I stop by LinkedIn every week or so, more for shits and giggles than anything. It’s a hard place to be. Frankly, since about 2020, I’ve found it a not very fun to browse. I dunno, whenever I go there, I just don’t feel very good. I think the reason is because I frequently hear from younger people in capital formation talk about phony job postings on LinkedIn. Also, I’ve made real relationships on Substack. I talk with other Substack creators often. A few of them have become friends of mine, and have had very real impacts on my day-to-day life. But there’s been one positive shift. LinkedIn has…
- Is This LP a Fit for Your Fund or SPV?
Guilty as charged, your honor. We’ve all done it. I’ve met with LPs who are a crappy fit. They’ve met with me. Why? Because I’ve been in sales for 27 years and I’m really good at getting people into meetings. Doesn’t mean it was a good idea for me or for them, lol. Even if you were a GP that started raising a fund 26 weeks ago, you probably are not terrible at what you do and you can probably land 50 or 100 meetings. These LPs have probably met with you too. They’ve wasted their time, and they’ve wasted your time. We were wondering what this actually cost so we did the math. Don’t worry, it…
- Most Family Offices Backing Emerging Managers Don’t Wanna Talk About It
Every emerging fund manager in our community want a check from a family office. I usually ask GPs to name 3 or 4 family offices that have written checks at their check size in their thesis in the last 12-18 months. Most can’t. The GPs that I see that get lots and lots of checks from family offices do 4 things right: They know the names of lots of family offices from memory. No AI needed They know what these family offices invest in and when They have 3-4 publications they read weekly to track family offices They have a person on their team who runs what we call a Family Office Program. This…
- Sometimes They Catch Ya
Took my kid to see Hot Water Music and The Menzingers at Great American Music Hall last night. I take children to punk shows on school nights. His first show was Bad Religion and The Avengers when he was 8, so he got kind of a late start. We were standing against the wall in the arcade along the east end of the building, and some guy came up to us at the end of Hot Water Music’s set and said, “Is this your kid?” I thought the show was all-ages, and for a second was thinking, “Oh shit, this guy is gonna throw the kid out.” “This is so amazing that your kid is here. You gotta bring the next…
- Fundraising: It’s Not A Switch You Flip
From the data we’ve seen, the fund managers who close aren’t the ones who sprint hard at the end of a raise. In fact, the results and data say the exact opposite. They’re they ones who just do not stop . They’re the ones who are constantly building pipeline. Every emerging manager we talk to knows fundraising is existential. Unfortunately, almost none of them do it until they absolutely have to. LPs can smell that. They call it panic fundraising. They know. We advise 135 investment firms right now. (About 40-45% of them are venture capital and private equity - the rest are real estate, growth…
- The Habits of GPs Who Close
Maybe you’ve heard of James Clear’s Atomic Habits . Maybe you believe in habits, maybe you don’t. The book is cheap. It’s less than nine bucks. Clear’s a pretty young guy. He’s 40. I’ve found his work pretty inspiring over the years. During his sophomore year of high school he was hit in the face with a baseball bat, and he was put into a medically induced coma. This is typically how I feel after most first-time fund managers meetings. But I am trying to be more kind and less blunt as I get older. Let me explain why. This is because most fund managers are second-career. They are former…
- GP Net Worth -> Your Fund Size
Look, first, it’s totally okay if you’re on drugs. That’s fine with me. I work in finance. I grew up in the ‘80s. If we remember anything, all we remember is “I learned it from watching you!” Anyway, our fund managers are beginning to get a ton of meetings. We have this little problem. We’re raising about $5B. We’re also about to roll out something big for fund managers. It will tell them three things: If their website’s ready for LPs to visit If the pipeline’s big enough to raise the fund If their LP meetings are converting: yes or no It then tells them the 3 big things they need to do today…
- Why LPs Say Yes, and How LP Blueprint's $4.5B+ in Raises Got There
I drive around in the car a lot and yell at my phone. That’s how I got the idea for Why LPs Say Yes . It’s also because I was really sick of hearing fund managers complain about LPs saying “no”. So that’s how we came up with How LPs Say Yes. We’ve had office hours for years. GPs dial in every Monday at 12pm PT (3pm ET) and say things like “What’s wrong with my deck? I don’t get second meetings!” and “What’s wrong with my website! LPs never book meetings with me!” After like 100 of these office hours I was like, “F*** this s***!” Why don’t we just do a program where the LPs chase down the fund…
- The Black Box: Why Raises Fail
When I was growing up we used to drive by this building on the freeway on our way to San Francisco called Failure Analysis Associates. My sister and I would always say, “Yeah, that’s their third building, the first two fell down.” I lurk in a lot of these book groups on Reddit that talk about esoteric and interesting books about why fund managers and businesses succeed and fail. I like to sit around and listen to really loud jazz and punk rock and read them. Just kidding, I do not read books, I was just saying that to make punk rock girls think I read. I’ve definitely written a few books, but…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: LP Blueprint. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Oct 21, 2026.