Family offices are the strangest corner of the market. The money is enormous, the decisions are fast, there is no committee, and the people are basically invisible. Either the office has no website or the website has no names on it. Databases hold them badly. The good ones prefer staying unfound, and the gatekeepers are excellent.
Which is why most founders give up on them and go back to spraying VCs who have already passed.
The offices are findable. The work is different from VC sourcing, and once the loop is built it runs in an afternoon.
What makes them worth the effort
That fourth row is the whole opportunity. Difficulty of access is what keeps the competition out, and every founder who gives up at that row leaves the office to whoever kept going.
Step one: start wider than you think
This part is free, because it decides everything downstream and almost everyone skips it.
The biggest mistake happens before any tool gets opened: people look for “family offices” as if that were one type of investor. It covers single family offices, multi family offices, family holding companies investing directly, offices that only go through funds, offices that anchor emerging managers, and offices doing direct deals in one sector because the family made its money there. Each is a different search with a different message.
So the starting point is always the same. Give Claude your deck, your thesis, as much context as you can, and ask who could plausibly write this cheque. Then push it. It gives you ten suggestions, and you say okay, what else? What is a broader way to cut this? What is a narrower one? Which regions have I missed? What about the offices that invest through funds instead of directly?
Paste this into Claude with your deck attached:
“Here is my deck. List every type of family office that could plausibly back this company, then keep going: broader categories, narrower ones, other regions, offices that invest through funds versus directly. Push well past the obvious ten. Then rank the full list by how likely they are to answer a cold message.”
The list of investor types roughly doubles past the first answer. The first answer is the same ten categories everybody gets, and the second and third pushes are where the offices nobody else is writing to show up.
Twenty minutes here beats a week of sending.
What the rest of this playbook covers
Everything below is the part that turns that definition into replies.
▫️ The sourcing tier list. The free build with Claude plus one scraper, roughly an hour and a few dollars, against the shortcut that starts from named contacts
▫️ The first message that gets answered, including the connection-request detail that most founders get backwards, and the honest reply-rate maths
▫️ The warm-intro map. Turning your own LinkedIn export into a ranked list of who already knows your targets, with the exact prompt and the one-line ask
▫️ The enrichment pass, so every contact arrives with two or three facts attached before you write a word
▫️ The sheet-to-HeyReach pipeline that sends a unique researched message to every person on the list, at volume, with zero copies
▫️ Plus the two back doors into offices that answer nothing cold
Your subscription also opens the full library:
▫️ A new investor list every week, 10,000+ named investors covering family offices, LPs, funds of funds and VCs
▫️ The 375 Prompt Book for Fundraising and every playbook across a raise
▫️ Pitch decks that raised capital and financial models ready to adapt
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