Here are the lessons I learned.Photo by Flickr from PexelsThis isn’t an exaggeration, this really happened. Let me give you some context: The $1.3 million was an investment check. The post was an image. The investment came from someone I’d never spoken to before and had seen the post and sent me a DM. Since this happened, I’ve had time to reflect on what made this possible, and there are some distinct lessons, which I will share in this story.But first, a little background. I run a startup (Stakester), we’re two years old, we’re in e-sports, so it’s a cool sector, and we’re experiencing some great user growth. I have just over 7k connections on LinkedIn.I wasn’t aiming to raise any money at this stage; we’d just closed a funding round. But we’re a startup, and the truth is we’re always raising, just maybe not formally. We’d dried up a little on the attention so I wanted to get noticed.I’d learned a valuable lesson during our last funding round: that when it comes to getting money, the opportunity for investors to make a huge return is everything, so I needed to grab their attention with something that showed this.With that in mind, here were the priorities;Show growth.