The video outlines the initial steps entrepreneurs should take before pitching to investors, emphasizing market research, business planning, and creating a pitch deck. It highlights the importance of market research for understanding competitors and valuations, and how a business plan serves as an internal guide and investor-facing document.
What this video covers
Market research & business planning. This is exactly where you want to start. You want to research, who are your competitors? How much have they raised? What were the potential valuations? This is stuff that you can find on Google, and there are some reports out there that you can use. Then, you can put together a business plan.
Now, business plans, they’re using them in a different form. Before, they were used to raise money, but now business plans are becoming more and more as a tool that you use internally to really understand and guide you through the next 18-24 months of execution and something that perhaps investors will want to look at. But this, essentially, is going to allow you to be prepared and to know the answers to the questions that are going to be coming your way when you meet with those investors.
Then, you want to create your pitch deck and supporting materials. The pitch deck is just like, for example, the template of the pitch deck below that founders are using all over the world to raise millions, which you can use today for free, so take a look at it. But, essentially, it is 15-25 slides where you convince and compress your story in a way in which it gets people excited.
Now, remember that typically, investors only allocate 2 minutes and 41 seconds to review a pitch deck, so you really need to understand how your balancing the visual with the text, how you have a nice flow and a nice structure on the story over the course of the slide to slide, And that’s essentially what you want to do on the pitch deck. You want to capture how exciting the future is looking ahead, how big the market, how great of a compounding annual growth rate your market has so that people are getting super excited.
There are other supporting documents that you want to have in place for this, and those are the following documents:
One-page business plan Action plan Executive summary Investor updates Explainer or intro videos Profile pages Press releases
On top of this, you also want to create the elevator pitch or that narrative where perhaps you are in-person so that you don’t sound robotic. It sounds as it is coming from the heart; it’s authentic. Authenticity, when you’re raising money, is critical. So, never sound like a robot.
Putting a good team together is essential. They’re always going to want to make sure that you have the right people. For this, you want to understand that the people you’re bringing in is not because they were your best friends in college or because you enjoy having a beer with them, but it’s because they are people you respect, and they bring a certain expertise that you do not have or that anyone else in your team has.
Start working, as well, on the basics. Obviously, in addition to having your team, you want to have the little details as well. You want to have your minimal viable product, which is either like the smallest thing that you can of your product or service to showcase that and to show that it’s tangible, and what it’s going to look like, or what it may look like.
You also want to have the right type of structure from an entity perspective that maybe your corporate lawyer helps you to structure. You also want to have your taxes in place, your accountant in place, because that is ultimately going to show the investors that you’ve done your homework. And that you’re serious.
