Angel groups are a great, great potential profile or target when you are thinking about raising money. Those are groups that have tons of investors that could really make an impact to your financing round.
What are angel groups? Angel groups are ultimately a group of angel investors, which are people that have over 00,000 in income or
million in assets, essentially qualified accredited investors that come together and that share deal flow, go to meetings together, invest together in companies. There are tons of angel groups, such as The New York Angels, the Houston Angel Network. There are many angel groups out there.
The truth of the matter is that with all those platforms like Crunchbase or AngelList, now, anyone can gain access to any type of deal.
Now, the term, angel investor, comes from very early on when investors were financing Broadway shows, and that’s why they were calling them angel investors because they were putting the money in and not expecting any returns back. They were just financing because they liked it because they were excited with the opportunity and so forth.
They can also invest via a special-purpose vehicle, which is an LLC, or they can invest via a venture fund. Now, you see a lot of these angel groups that are getting more sophisticated, creating their own investment vehicles, which are funds, and using those to invest as a group into your business.
If they schedule a call, probably they’re going to ask you for the pitch deck before that conversation. Other times, what they could do is that they have the meeting with you, they have the call with you, and then they ask for the pitch deck to be sent as a follow-up after the conversation.
Once they have reviewed, they may share this with the angel investor that takes the lead, or that is the president or the chairman of that organization. If the chairman also likes the opportunity, then they may invite you to a prescreening session.
Some angel groups’ websites may offer the possibility for you to submit your pitch deck. I think that this is a mistake because, ultimately, social proof is everything. So, what you want to do is take a look at who are the founders and entrepreneurs that have received in the last 6 to 12 months an investment from that angel group that you’re looking to target.
What you’re doing is you’re going to be using that entrepreneur to introduce you to one of the angels in that organization or even the director of deal flow at that angel group. That is the best way. That is how you’re going to get that warm intro and how you’re going to be able to reduce the amount of time from the first touchpoint to money in the bank.
When you are engaging with the angel group, you are going to have different types of versions of the pitch deck. First, you’re going to have the version that you’re going to be submitting initially when you don’t know them. Maybe there is going to be a version where you are removing the secret sauce of your business.
The other pitch deck that you’re going to be using is if you are presenting in person to that angel group, one thing that you want to do is remove as much text as possible from your pitch deck and increase the amount of visuals in your presentation so that way, they get to focus on you because it’s essential that they focus on you.
During the process, you want to be very good at follow-ups. Once you’ve already put the pitch deck on their end, maybe even that thank you pitch deck that is after you’ve done your thing, it is the last thing so that they get an idea of what your business is about. You will be sharing here the full pitch deck, the full financial model.
Then, you want to go into the follow-up. On the follow-up, every couple of weeks, stay top-of-mind. Try to share something that has been a great update of the business. It could be more revenues. It could be a new team member that you onboarded.
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