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I often get asked by other startup founders what investors are looking for, so I thought I’d take some time to explain it for future reference.
BTW: If you like this post, you’ll love the much more in-depth Pitching Masterclass.
Read on to understand what TTT means.
Yours truly live on stage at LeWeb in Paris pitching “Gauss - The People Magnet” (Image CC @francois_tancre)
I see a lot of startup pitches and pitch decks. And most of them suck. So let me share some basic knowledge to help you avoid my rookie mistakes and to help you massively improve your pitch so that when you potentially try to secure either something similar to small business loans in Orlando or before you reach out to investors, to start raising that funding round you have something more solid to present. It’s so important to clearly explain your business and its goals. You should also mention who your target market is. This will allow investors to understand the sort of demographic that you’ll be appealing to, allowing them to work out whether or not there is a gap for this business. Once a business has worked out who the target market is, they’ll be able to engage in personalized marketing. This can build customer loyalty and trust, whilst also increasing sales. Perhaps businesses should find more online about personalized marketing. It could be impressive for investors.
(If you like this post, you’ll probably love the much more in-depth Pitching Masterclass.)
There are actually three pitches you need to master. Read on to master them all.
Recently I was back in Switzerland. This time I was teaching Co-operation Management and Innovation Clusters at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland outside of Zürich.
Unfortunately I cannot share the slides I used this time due to 3rd party IP rights.
What I can share are the six factors that repeat in successful innovation clusters, like say Boulder, Colorado:
Luck
Infrastructure
Low costs
Supportive public offices
Quality of living
Qualified workforce
How would you rate each factor where you are situated? What could be improved? What needs to be improved? What will you start to improve? Conversely, where will you move your business if these factors aren’t satisfactory where you are today?
Speaking truth to the crowd, why NRW is a great place to found your startup Copyright: Ralph Sondermann, http://www.ralphsondermann.com
I recently had the honor and pleasure to be invited by NRW.INVEST together with representatives from The Pirate Summit to present the advantages of founding a startup in our state at the Czech and Hungarian “Stammtisch” in Düsseldorf, to a crowd of regional officials and stakeholders, Czech and Hungarian emissaries and startups.
Posing with NRW.INVEST, IHK Dortmund and the Czech and Hungarian delegates Copyright: Ralph Sondermann, http://www.ralphsondermann.com
I didn’t use any slides for this presentation, but you can find a lot of the content in the presentation I previously held for a French delegation.
The very first Lean Launchpad DUS Powered by PwC is a wrap! 9 teams entered the 5 week program – and 6 teams made it through. Have a look at the final public presentation day in the video below:
The Lean Launchpad is the world’s premier pre-accelerator program for startups. It’s an intensive 5 week, in-person, mentorship-driven 100% experience-based course to create more capable regional entrepreneurs and prepare them for their first investment round, an application to an accelerator, launching their first minimum viable product or setting them off on a self-funded, bootstrapped path.
See you again soon – Lean Launchpad is coming back to Cologne again for 2016 – so stay tuned for the dates!