When to socialize your deal with investors:
You should have 2-3 investors that you can ping whenever about whatever. So go early to them ("hey, I'm looking at this deal").
For broader equity outreach, the best time is when your diligence has progressed from the qualification to the verification stage, where any incomplete due diligence doesn't alter the narrative in the CIM (i.e., no material risks are unresolved).
If critical (bad) information arrives after you've looped in investors, then you lose momentum, which can kill the deal.If you start too late, you risk disgruntling the seller when you have to extend the LOI.
Separately, I would typically approach lenders before equity investors.
