Step 1 - Think about Narrative

Raising capital at the early stages is all about story telling. Think about the following when crafting your story:

• Why now: Why is there a unique opportunity to serve a huge market that hasn't existed before?
• Why this: Why is your product/service the right way of satisfying the market?
• Why you: Why of all the teams in the world are you the best to execute on this?

Step 2 - Structure the Story (without slides)

<aside> 💡 Write 1-2 sentences for each headline. Each sentence should flow from the next. Then dot point key things you want to cover for each.

</aside>

When telling your story, try to fit it into the following structure:

• Founder/Team
  • What makes you & your team special? How did you arrive at this problem?
  • E.g. We spent years as financial accountants, then came along crypto…
• Problem
  • What is the pain point that your customers experience? What is your deep insight into the customer experience?
  • E.g. Each crypto trade creates a taxable event, our customers had no idea what to do.
• Solution
  • How are you solving the problem? What is the core value proposition?
  • E.g. So we have created a SaaS platform that can automatically calculate tax liability from crypto trading activity, saving 24 hours a year for consumers
• Market
  • How many people who would pay for the solution? Why is the market rapidly expanding?
    • E.g. There are 40 million people with crypto in the US, UK & Aus, with an APRA of $100, our market size is $4 Billion
• Competition
  • Who else is trying to service the same market and how? Why is your solution far better?
    • E.g. There are a few players but none have APIs that connect into all the centralised exchanges, it would take 3 years to build all the connections we have.
• Go-To-Market
  • How will you reach your customers?
    • E.g. We will use a SEO strategy + content marketing to own the “Crypto Tax” search space
• Traction
  • What traction have you had to date (can be revenue, usage or anything that shows the business is executing on milestones).
    • E.g. We already have 400,000 users using our free tax calculator.

Step 3 - Create Pitch Deck

Prepare an 8–10-page slideshow that covers the above headings. It will generally be emailed to investors as a PDF. In practice, investors receive hundreds of these and will often spend less than a minute skimming over each one so it needs to be short and sweet.

Here are some examples from the past: