5 Tips To Make Investors Beg You To Take Their Money

So, your basement business moved into an official shared workspace. You hired your first small team, and you’re ready to pitch your big vision to a prominent investor. There’s only one problem – you don’t know where to start.

Sure, you’ve given presentations in high school, but now you’ve got more than your grades at stake. This is your life’s work. Your entire dream is riding on your ability to convince someone else to believe in you enough to hand over some serious cash.

If you want to create brilliantly convincing presentations to fund your business without making rookie mistakes, here are some tips that can help:

1. Perfect your sales pitch

Your sales pitch will be at the heart of your presentations, whether you’re using slides in a meeting or talking to people over lunch. You should know your sales pitch inside and out and be ready for conversation at any given moment.

2. Create a solid pitch deck

If you want to get funded, you need a funding presentation that leaves no doubt that investing in your business is a smart move. In fact, your presentation should make it clear that not investing in your business is a mistake. Investors should feel like they’re missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime if they walk away.

To help you achieve this, Slide Heroes offers some solid pitch deck wisdom, including advice from top VCs and entrepreneurs like Guy Kawasaki, Dave McClure, Michael Wolfe, and Mark Suster.

Their guide describes in detail, that what you include in your pitch deck should vary based on your needs. For example, let’s say you already have an established product and market. If you need funding to adapt your business model to new markets, your pitch deck needs to show investors how the product fits into that new market. If you need funding to scale your business, your pitch deck should not focus on your vision. Instead, it needs to provide evidence that your business will scale.

Don’t attempt to over-sell your vision to every investor. It’s not always necessary.

3. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t have a product yet!

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can’t pitch for funding until you have revenue and a product for sale. If that’s your situation, you want to focus on obtaining seed money first, and there are plenty of investors who specifically look for places to invest seed money.

Venture capitalists and angel investors often provide between $250k-$1m in seed funding for startups. Although, what the two look for is completely different. For instance, angel investors generally invest less than venture capitalists. An angel investor is more likely to say “yes” to you when they fall in love with your vision. They’re less likely to make future investments, due to limited capital.

Venture capitalists, on the other hand, are more likely to continue funding multiple rounds once you’ve convinced them your business is a worthwhile investment.

4. Know you are not exempt from the “less is more” rule

Less is always more, especially when you don’t think it applies to you. Don’t make the mistake of believing your presentation is just too fantastic to cut short. Experts like Guy Kawasaki agree that pitches should be about 20 minutes, and you can’t have too few slides.

Your presentation should fit within a maximum of ten slides using a font size of 30 points. Do whatever you can do cut it down if you exceed those specs.

5. Know what problem your business wants to solve

Your job is to convince investors that your business can solve an important problem and generate revenue as a result. How are you going to make your customers happy? What pain are you relieving? Why are customers going to be excited to throw money your way? According to Mark Suster, the problem your business wants to solve should be your reason for existing.

If you can’t demonstrate to investors that your customers are at the end of their rope looking for your specific solution, you’ll have a difficult time landing a decent amount of funding.

You might have the most amazing product in the world but if you can’t explain why people would beat down your door to get it, you need to figure that out before you pitch investors.

At the end of the day, getting funded is all about convincing investors to give you money. Investors want to see more than just income projections. They want to know your business is viable long-term, and not just a flash in the pan.

 

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