Investor Guide
A Member's Guide to Sourcing, Diligence, and Voting
This guide explains what you do as a member of a Fish School: how deals enter the pipeline, how the group decides which ones to fund, and what's expected from you at each stage. It covers the full lifecycle of a deal from proposal to on-chain funding, across both the Telegram group and the Fish Network platform.
For full details on how to use @fishschool_bot itself (every command, button, and flow), see the separate Bot Usage Guide. This doc describes what you do; the Bot Usage Guide describes how to do it in the bot interface.
What Fish Network is, in one paragraph
Fish Network is an investment club platform where small groups of investors pool capital and decide together which startups to back. A single investment club is called a Fish School. Each Fish School is run by an Organizer, a vetted investor with expertise in a specific area like AI, gaming, or DeFi. As a member of a Fish School (sometimes called a "Fish"), you commit capital once, earn reputation points for participating in decisions, and help the School choose which startups get funded. You'll do three things on a recurring basis: help propose and filter deals, help research them, and vote on whether to actually invest.
Where things happen
Your Fish School lives on the Fish Network platform. That's where the School was formed as a legal entity, where your capital sits in the School's treasury after you onboard, where the deal history lives, and where every binding action (deal creation, funding votes, capital release, distributions) actually happens. Attached to your School is a private Telegram group run by a bot called @fishschool_bot. The Telegram side is the conversation layer: fast, cheap, and built for discussion. The platform is where the serious, auditable work lives.
A Fish School might see five to ten deals in a given week, but only one or two are worth the time of creating a formal on-chain campaign. The Telegram group exists to filter the noise: members discuss, debate, and run a group vote on whether a deal deserves the effort of becoming a real on-chain deal. The ones that survive that filter move to the platform, where the actual investment happens with wallet-signed votes and escrow-backed capital. Nothing you do in Telegram moves money. Nothing on-chain happens until a deal gets to the platform.
How you join and get set up
When an Organizer invites you to their Fish School, you'll receive a link that opens a conversation with @fishschool_bot on Telegram. The bot asks you three short questions: what sectors interest you, what check size you typically write, and what investment stages you prefer. This takes about two minutes and creates your investor profile, and the bot then gives you a link to join the School's private Telegram group. Inside that group you'll see forum topics for Voting, Diligence, Announcements, and a GPT assistant. That's your home base on the Telegram side.
The social side of joining (a place in the Telegram group and a profile in the bot) is only half of becoming a member. The other half happens on the platform, where you complete accreditation, sign the onboarding paperwork, and deposit capital into your School's treasury. Until you've done that platform-side onboarding, you can read the group and watch discussions, but you can't participate in funding votes on the platform; those require you to be a capitalized member.
You'll use the same wallet that's been KYC'd through Coinbase or Kraken to sign funding votes on the platform later on. You only need to set this up once per Fish School.
Stage 1 - Sourcing: how deals enter the pipeline
Sourcing is the word for everything that happens from the moment someone spots a promising startup to the moment that startup becomes something the group will formally discuss. You can participate as a proposer or just as someone who watches what others propose; both are legitimate and expected.
Proposing a deal yourself
Any member can propose a deal through the bot. The bot walks you through a short form asking for the company name, the website URL, a Twitter or X profile if the company has one, the niche the deal fits into, a short free-text "how aligns with thesis" explanation of why this deal is worth the School's time, and a question asking how the investment aligns with the School's thesis. The thesis alignment question is the most important one; if you can't articulate in a few sentences why this deal fits, the Organizer probably won't approve it, and thinking through the answer often helps you figure out whether you actually want to propose it in the first place.
Once you confirm the summary, the proposal is submitted. You're capped at a generous daily limit per School, which in practice is generous enough that you'll never hit it; in reality most members propose one or two deals a month.
What happens after you submit
The Organizer of your School is notified immediately. They review your proposal and decide what to do with it. There are three possible outcomes and the bot will DM you as soon as there's a decision.
If it's approved, the proposal moves into the Diligence stage. The deal is posted to the Diligence forum topic in your group where the whole School can see it and start discussing. If it's denied, the Organizer usually includes a short reason: off-thesis, already known, too early, not enough information, and so on. A denied proposal is closed; nothing else happens with it, and you're free to propose something else. If it's still pending review, it just means the Organizer hasn't gotten to it yet; no action needed from you.
Why the Organizer filters first
The Organizer is responsible for the quality of the School's deal flow. Their job at this stage isn't to decide whether the deal is a good investment; that's a group decision that comes later. Their job is to make sure the group isn't spending time on deals that are obviously off-thesis or unsuitable for the School. Think of approval as a "does this deserve the group's attention?" check, not a "should we invest?" check.
Stage 2 - Diligence: the research phase
Once a deal is approved, it lands in the Diligence forum topic in your School's Telegram group. This is where the group digs into whether the deal is actually worth investing in. Diligence runs for 48 hours and has two parallel tracks that both feed into the vote that follows.
The automated track
When a deal is posted to Diligence, an AI pipeline runs a series of research passes on it. It pulls the company's website and summarizes the product and team. It reads the founder's Twitter or X presence. It compares the project to similar companies in the space. And it scans for obvious red flags: broken tokenomics, missing team pages, suspicious partnerships, or inconsistencies between public claims and reality. The output is a short structured brief attached to the deal post in the Diligence topic. It's not a recommendation; it's raw context that saves you the time of doing basic research yourself.
The group track
Alongside the AI brief, the group discusses the deal openly in the Diligence topic. Anyone can comment, share links, flag concerns, or argue through the thesis. This is the core of the diligence process and the thing that makes Fish Schools more valuable than investing alone: the collective read from a group of investors with different expertise and angles usually catches things individuals miss.
The Organizer may run Telegram polls during this window if they want structured group input on a specific question. Polls can be anonymous or public, single-answer or multi-answer. When one opens, it shows up in the group and you can vote with a tap.
What you should actually do
If you have specific knowledge about the deal (you know the founders, you've used the product, you understand the market), share it in the Diligence topic. If a poll opens, vote in it. If you're skeptical about something, say so. Schools make better decisions when the skeptics are loud.
You don't have to participate in diligence to vote later, but members who do participate tend to vote with better conviction, and their input shapes how everyone else votes.
Stage 3 - Pre-deal voting: does this deserve real capital?
After 48 hours of diligence, voting opens automatically. The bot posts an anonymous poll in the Voting forum topic of your School's group. You have 72 hours to vote. The options are Yes, No, or Abstain.
How the poll works
The poll is anonymous. Other members cannot see how you voted, and you cannot see how they voted. All you see is the running tally. You can change your vote at any time before the 72 hours are up by tapping a different button. The group gets automated reminders at 12 hours and 3 hours before the deadline if turnout is low.
The threshold for passing is 51% YES among members who voted. Abstains are recorded but don't count toward the threshold.
What this vote actually decides
This is the single most important distinction in the whole flow. The pre-deal vote is not the funding vote. It does not move any money. It does not commit you to anything on-chain. It's the group saying "yes, this deal deserves the effort of becoming a real on-chain campaign" or "no, let's not spend more time on this." A yes outcome here doesn't release any capital. It just clears the deal to proceed to the platform, where the actual on-chain deal gets created and the real binding funding vote happens.
If the pre-deal vote fails, the deal dies here. No on-chain deal is created, no capital is touched, no wallets are opened. The group moves on to the next proposal.
Why this step exists
Creating an on-chain deal costs real time and real gas. Coordinating a binding wallet-signed funding vote costs everyone's attention. If the group isn't at least 51% convinced a deal is worth that effort, it shouldn't happen. The pre-deal vote is the filter that protects the group from wasting coordination bandwidth on deals that weren't going to fund anyway.
Stage 4 - Platform: the on-chain deal and the funding vote
If the pre-deal vote passes, the deal moves to the Fish Network platform. This is where Telegram activity ends and on-chain activity begins. Everything before this stage was filtering; everything from here on is formal and binding.
The handoff: the Organizer or deal champion creates the deal
A passing pre-deal vote does not automatically create an on-chain deal. Someone has to actually go to the platform and set it up. That someone is either the Organizer or the original deal champion (the member who proposed the deal). They open the platform, pick from a set of pre-approved deal templates, and fill in the parameters for this specific deal: the startup, the investment amount, the security terms, the funding vote duration, and any deal-specific conditions. The templates handle the legal and contractual structure; the deal champion only fills in the variables.
When they publish, the platform deploys the deal contract on-chain, wires it to your School's treasury and escrow, and opens the funding vote. The bot announces the new deal back in your School's Voting topic with a link to the platform, and you'll also get a DM from the bot pointing you to it.
The funding vote
The funding vote is the one that actually commits capital. You open the platform, connect your wallet (the same one you KYC'd with), review the deal terms, and cast your vote: Yes or No. Because the vote is wallet-signed, it's cryptographically tied to your identity, recorded on-chain, and final once cast. Abstaining is effectively just not voting.
The threshold is simple majority: 51% of votes cast must be Yes for the deal to fund. One important thing to understand about how this works: you're not sending money when you vote yes. Capital was already pooled into the School's treasury when you onboarded. A yes vote authorizes the release of your pro-rata share of that treasury capital into the deal's escrow. If the vote passes, escrow releases to the startup according to the deal terms. If it fails, the deal closes cleanly and no capital moves.
Either way, the bot detects the result via the platform and announces it back in your School's Voting topic to close the loop. The deal also gets added to your School's permanent history on the platform, where you can track it going forward.
FISH points and participation
Every time you participate (propose a deal, cast a pre-deal vote, cast an on-chain funding vote), you earn FISH points. These are reputation points that build your track record on the platform and will eventually unlock additional capabilities across the network. Participate consistently and your points accumulate. The details of what points unlock will evolve, but the underlying principle is simple: active members get rewarded.
Putting it all together
A deal's full journey, from the user point of view:
Someone proposes the deal through the bot. The Organizer approves it within a day. The deal appears in the Diligence topic with an AI research brief. For 48 hours the group discusses it in the Diligence topic and you weigh in where you have useful signal. Voting opens automatically in the Voting topic; you cast your pre-deal vote, and 72 hours later the result is announced. If it passes, the Organizer or deal champion goes to the platform and creates the on-chain deal from a template. You open the platform, connect your wallet, review the deal terms, and cast your funding vote. Either capital moves from the treasury to the startup or the deal closes. From proposal to funded deal, the full cycle takes about 5 to 6 days.
You can do as much or as little as you want at each stage. The one thing that matters most is showing up for the votes, both the pre-deal vote in Telegram and the funding vote on the platform. Those are the moments where the group makes its decisions, and a Fish School only works when its members show up for them.