This video emphasizes the critical role of investor meetings in startup fundraising and how to best prepare for them. It highlights that investors quickly decide whether to grant a second meeting, so founders must justify the time given by getting investors excited from the start.
What this video covers
The role of investor meetings in startup fundraising are really critical. Whether you’re at an angel stage or whether you’re at a venture capital stage, which essentially is early-stage or more like later-stage, it is going to define how you can convince these people, and how you can get them excited and justify the time that they’re giving you.
Typically, what you’re going to encounter when you’re going out there, and you’re meeting with investors is that they’re just going to give you a few minutes. Literally, in the first couple of minutes, they’re going to know if they want to give you another meeting or not.
When it goes into the business talk, make sure that you have your pitch deck ready to go. And by the way, below, you can find a pitch deck template that founders are using all over the world to raise millions, which you can just grab for free now. Again, always do your homework, know the investment thesis of that investor, what segment are they investing in, what location they invest in, and then also what financing cycle is a clear fit and what they’re excited about?
In terms of how to get investor meetings, you can get those via your own network. Maybe they’re colleagues, friends, family members. Eventually, if you don’t find a clear way to do that with people in your network, it’s very simple.
Then, what you do is you grab and reach out to entrepreneurs that have received an investment from those investors that you want to target in the last 6-12 months, and you ultimately connect with that entrepreneur and ask them, after you’ve connected meaningfully, for an introduction to their own investor. Those are the best introductions because they come with social proof. It’s like when you go to an event, and you meet the cousin of a friend or the brother of a friend. That trust is already present with that. You want that social proof to have that instant background relatedness, as well, with those investors that you want to target. So, either directly, via people in your network, or by entrepreneurs that have received an investment with those investors, those are all great ways to really get that introduction into those investors that you want to tackle.
You should budget for a lot of investor meetings, whether that is time, because, obviously, there are going to be many more meetings. Typically, it takes, on average, 100 noes for every yes that you get, so budget for many of those meetings to happen because the bigger the funnel is that you have, the people at the top, the more that are going to come at the bottom and make an investment.
You also want to schedule those meetings on your own terms. What this means is that when you’re fundraising, you always want to have all the investors scheduled at the same time. You want to have them at the same place because this is like sales. It’s a different form of sales. So, you want to have them all at the intro phase, at the first call phase, at the follow-up phase, at the offering document phase, or even cash being wired and into the bank phase. But always try to have them all at the same time, so that’s going to give you that boost of confidence.
First, talk about this as if it was a movie. You want to talk about that day that you came up with the idea, how you brought it to life, how you thought about building your team together. It’s like when you’re reading a book, and it tells you the kind of food they ate that day or perhaps what kind of weather was happening that day. It really makes you be part of it. So, you want to do that too.
