When you raise money, you will likely speak to at least thirty investors. As much as we like to pretend that we are different, the majority of questions will be similar.
It takes a lot of time out of your day to take meetings/email threads to explain the same thing over and over again. Why not just recycle content?
The joys of video calls are few, but one is that you can do the pitch once and then make an infinite number of copies to send to investors. This will save you a lot of time.
Investors often take first calls to sniff around and see if something is interesting — you could take hundreds of first calls if you accepted every invitation. If the investor doesn’t want to have a first call after seeing your pitch, they probably never would have invested anyway, and you just saved 30 minutes.
It’s also great because you will likely be pitching multiple people at the same VC at different times. By having a pre-recorded pitch you can circulate it around to them, so that the whole team can get up to speed quicker.
In an ideal world, time spent with investors should be more about relationship building than pitching.
Most investors ask similar questions, so it’s best to make a list of the most common ones you receive and write the most convincing answers you can. You can then put this on a notion and share it around with investors.
Here are the key areas you want to flesh out:
Problem:
Solution:
Founder:
Product:
Old way:
Stage:
Traction:
Revenue: