What would you do if you had a million pounds in your business bank account? Would you hire a better marketing team? A VP of Sales to turbocharge enterprise sales? Or get your clunky MVP replaced with something smooth that users love?
At the moment that cash is in an investor’s pocket and you need to figure out how to get it into yours. Startup fundraising is all about learning the approaches, processes and tips to be able to create a good pitch, get to the right people and present to them with clarity and effectiveness.
If you don’t know who to reach out to, have no well-heeled contacts or a deep network that you can ask for introductions fundraising can be tough. It doesn’t matter how good your deck is, if the people looking at it don’t care and don’t have the cash.
If the deck doesn’t excite someone when they see it why will they book a call with you? Where will the opportunity to pitch come from if you can’t tell a clear and powerful story that gets investors excited? It’s easy to put a deck together, and harder to tell a story that is compelling to investors. That leads to disappointment and heartache.
When you are presenting is your pitch smooth and exciting? Do you pause, stutter, stammer or look worse than Richard Nixon on TV? Does your delivery deeply undersell your startup and blow any chance you have of getting funded?
On the side, you’ve got to run the startup and get the traction that investors demand. If you don’t have the numbers…
No wonder entrepreneurs would rather keep working on the business than do the fundraising grind. But it has to be done to give you the runway and the ability to grow fast!
Startup Pitch Deck Review
Making your deck great is the first thing that we do. It’s easy to see how the deck works when you are immersed in the business. I look at your deck with crystal clear focus. Does it work? What are the problems? How does it need to change? What can we cut? What are the questions you haven’t covered?
In the review, I go through your deck with an axe. 30 – 60 minutes of detailed feedback on each slide and how the deck works. That’s a screencast, so you can watch, pause, make changes, or give it to your designer.
Just with this feedback, and doing something about it, your deck will be better than 80-90% of all the other startup decks out there.
Why does it work? I have reviewed thousands of decks for big VCs, helped hundreds of startups make their decks better, and given feedback to startups on their pitches at dozens of demo days. Your choice is to learn by experience or learn from my experience
Investor Outreach
It’s hard when you need to raise money and you have no idea who to talk to. Perhaps you’ve already asked, even raised money from friends and family, but you need to spread the net wider.
How do you do it?
I’ve been in that position in the past and it sucks. You can get hot leads at networking events, that are tepid by midnight and icy by dawn. You can grind through LinkedIn and VC websites, writing beautiful, relevant and customised introductions, and sit watching your empty inbox to become more exciting than the Maidan in Kyiv. (It doesn’t)
Or you can grab me for a call and we help you reach out to our database of angel investors and venture capitalists. There are more than three thousand of them, across the world. With our outreach, you can be talking to Sequoia in a couple of days or have term sheets worth more than £300k in just over a week.
That’s not to say that the network is everything, your choice of problem and solution and the mistakes you’ve made along the way matter more, but it certainly helps. Do you want to get the round closed, and do it quickly?
Pitch Presentation
Are your palms sweaty and your bladder full as you wait for the call to start? Do you launch with meaningless platitudes boring the investors within sixty seconds? Do you go on wonderful, irrelevant tangents or lose the plot and struggle with what to say next? Do you punctuate your sentences with umms and ahhs for dramatic effect?
If you do it’s certain that the pitch sessions aren’t having the impact that you want. Ghosted after the first date.
In the pitch presentation package, you send me a video of you delivering your deck, after we’ve polished it. Then I give you direct feedback to help you be more compelling, convincing and converting.
As a Toastmaster and public speaker, there are clear rules on how to make a presentation effective. You will learn what you are doing and what you need to change. There are different rules for making a startup presentation powerful.
You’ll have these explained by screencast and be able to use them to hone and refine your pitch.
Startup silver tongue ain’t got nothin’ on ya!
I do fundraising services with Professor Andy Pardoe at Wisdom Works Ventures
