How and what do you pitch to give yourself the best chance?

How?

Check out the Step by Step Guide for all the steps. Here you will find more on the pitching aspects.

You will need a short pitch deck, and a long pitch deck. This short one is for sending via email to get meetings and build interest, the long one is for pitching in the big meetings and then sending afterwards to allow for investors to get a reasonably detailed view across your startup as step 1 of their DD.

• Once you start phase two, expect to have 40-100 investor meetings (I have heard of raises from 2 meetings if its follow on and a closed round from known investors but this is not the norm and not to be expected. One benefits of this strategy is less meetings and time, but the downside can be missing out on a round if the small number of investors don't proceed and downward price pressure on the round due to lack of competition)
• For one founder it is a full time role
• Build investor relationships - invest in lines, not dots
• Key result - get partner meetings with VC's where all partners are in the room. From the partner meeting, things move very quickly to yes (Term Sheet) or no.
• If you can't get a term sheet or lead investor you can do a bridging round. A bridging round is normally 25-40% of the round target and is done on a SAFE to allow the company time to get to the milestones needed for the round.

What?

• Short Pitch Deck
  • 10 slides
  • Most important slides
    • Mission - what is the huge impact that you want to have. Measured in billions
    • Team - Why are you so awesome
    • Traction - numbers. Ideally revenue, or customers / users. How quick to $1m ARR
  • Here is a great deck template of the right slides. You need to handle design yourself 🤓
  • Happy customers are key to getting investment - so highlight this
  • Don't include disclaimers
  • Storytelling is super important
  • Don't include financial forecasts or hockey stick growth charts - its not cool
• Long Pitch Deck
  • Can be 10-20 pages plus appendix. 20-30 pages total.
  • More detail on each page without being a super wordy IM style doc.
  • Each page still needs to be easily consumable and only cover one main point.
  • Pitchable - so go through each slide in max 20 minutes. Don't pitch it word for word but go through the slides. Don't wing meetings. Go through the info, then make sure you leave time for questions.
  • Details in the appendix in case you get questions on things and you can them properly answer them
• What do investors want?
  • A balance between short term goals and returns, and the massive mission and big TAM
  • Short term - investors want to approximately double their money each year and to see how you can achieve big short term results
  • Long term - investors want to make 10-100+ times their money by connecting to your power and vision.
  • So you have to tell a great short term story of how you succeed, and a great long term story on how you get big, and have a big impact

How to pitch your traction

Article by Afterwork Ventures HERE