The Startup Funding Book

Getting to the next step
The point of the first email, the executive summary, and the pitch deck is to ultimately get funding for your startup. Each step leads to the next. The purpose of the first contact email is to be invited to send the executive summary. The purpose of the executive summary is to get the investor to want to see the pitch deck. The pitch deck is to persuade them to fund your startup. If they say ‘no’ at any of these stages, what do you do then?
You ask for feedback. Perhaps the material is unclear.

Many s end their presentation to investors with a Q&A slide. Don’t make that mistake. It’s best to end on the summary slide and leave that slide up during the Q&A part of the meeting. This way every time they look up, they’ll be reminded why they should invest.

Slide 14 – Summary
Finally, summarise why the investor should invest.

The ask
The ask slide is all about how much money you are looking for and what you’ll give in return. It’s critical that you show how far the money you are asking for will take you. Will the financing take you all the way to a profitable company? How far will it take you? Many startups make the mistake of not including this information.

Focus instead on the overall business model with a few different scenarios on how different degrees of success/growth will impact the future financial.

Many startups fail to communicate how they are planning to build such defensibility.

All VCs are looking for cases who are building something that’s hard for future competitors to copy

Your unfair advantage
You’ve shown that you have a solution to a problem and the team to make that solution real and successful. Now you need to show your special skills – how you can solve this problem better than anyone else. This is your unfair advantage. What makes you special? Do you know something others don’t? Do you have some intellectual property? Have you seen what others haven’t and does that give you first-mover advantage? What is it? You need to tell.

Lunar Way nailed it when they pitched for us. They said: ‘Seventy-one per cent of millennials would rather go to the dentist than listen to their bank – we are mobile banking for millennials’. You want to leave the listener with a ‘no brainer’ reaction.

All these companies would have benefitted from adding basic contact information at the bottom of the first slide: website address, email, name of contact person etc.