This year, Redbud grew more than it ever has. More people read our work, more founders found us, and more deals came in.

Here are our numbers through August 2026:

• 4.6 million impressions across X, LinkedIn, and the newsletter

• 28,050 new followers, for 64,300 total

• 17,000 newsletter subscribers

• 45 articles published

• 20 events hosted

Deal flow grew about 70%, from 292 new companies a month in 2025 to roughly 500 this year.

The number that surprised us the most wasn’t impressions. We do less outbound than we did two years ago, and a bigger share of our deals comes from outbound anyway.

In Fund I, 8 of 30 investments came from outbound, about 27%. In Fund II, it's 6 of 13, about 46%. We have the same team, with fewer cold emails, and almost double the share.

But there’s one difference. Founders know who we are before the email lands. That's what a year of writing in public bought us.

“With a great audience comes great credibility.” – Stan Lee, probably.

How we grew our following

We used a tool called Owlead to automate following on X. We set it to find profiles with founder and investor keywords in their bios, plus the people following accounts we already knew our audience followed. Over time, that built a following made up of the exact people we wanted to reach.

Then we started posting. Each follow did more than just increase our count. A founder gets a notification that I followed them, clicks my profile, reads a few posts, and sometimes reaches out. A lot of our organic inbound started that way.

People talk about all these different content strategies. Should you post on Tuesday mornings or Thursday nights? There’s a deep rabbit hole you can go down, but I’ll share what’s worked for us. 

We posted one tweet a day, and one article a week (on X, Medium, and LinkedIn).

It’s simple.

• Write one article a week, about what you’re thinking about

• Edit it to be as short and clear as possible

• Make the title something you would click

• Pull small snippets from the article to tweet

• Repeat

Boom. Now you have a lot of great content, a much bigger brand, and more deal flow. 

The exciting thing about evergreen articles is they keep paying off long after you publish them. Every one gives us a week of snippets to tweet. They also gave us enough material to add a second newsletter, so now we hit the inboxes of 17,000 people twice a month, with open rates between 40% and 50%.

We have a big appetite for the written word. We think investor memos are underrated, and we write about things we've earned the right to talk about. We don’t write takes on things we don’t touch. The internet has plenty of those already.

Why this works for a small fund

A $35M fund doesn't have the brand budget of a tier-1 fund. But what we do have is a team that writes.

Every article does three jobs at once. It tells founders what we believe before they pitch, so the ones who reach out are a fit. It gives our LPs a window into how we think between updates. And it makes our cold emails a little less cold.

The founders who reply to our outbound now have usually read something I wrote. It definitely changes the dynamic of our first meeting.

If your fund disappeared tomorrow, how many founders would notice from your writing alone?