Category Archives: entrepreneurship

Education, entrepreneurship, pitching

Financing Strategy for Startups, Peer to Peer Session @ Ignition+ DUS

Recently I had the honor to be invited as the startup founder perspective alongside the legal (Patrick Müller, Hauking) and VC investor (Jan Linzner, TechVision Fonds) perspectives, at a peer to peer feedback session on startup financing strategy with the current batch of incubated startups at the Ignition+ accelerator (startup support program) in Düsseldorf.

I think it went down ok…

Here are some of the evergreens I remember rattling off in the session:

  • A sale a day keeps the VC away!
  • Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money
  • Don’t listen to VCs for fundraising advice – you wouldn’t ask casinos in Las Vegas for gambling advice, now would you (please say no)
  • Traction is the Catnip of investors
  • You don’t HAVE to raise money if you don’t need to (if your biz model or private funds allow it)
  • Mo’ money, mo’ problems – round closed? Congrats – you now have another set of problems added, two business models to serve
  • There is no formula for pricing (valuation) a pre- to seed stage round; it’s about ownership, what you can get is what you can get, it’s a product of two factors 1. how little % you can get away with selling 2. how much money you can get for said %
  • Discuss and decide amongst founders the absolute Max % (dilution) is acceptable to you to sell in this round IN ADVANCE, before raising, BEFORE you start pitching to investors
  • Don’t sell too much too early (pre- /seed, not more than 24% absolute MAX, more like 5-16%)
  • in the pitch deck you send to investors, DO NOT STATE % (as that reveals your valuation up front), DO please state how much you are raising (and for exactly at, why, when)
  • Focus on discussing milestones (Do you not think these are the correct ones? Can we add value cheaper? Remove risks differently? etc) with investors, never argue for the valuation (red herring!)
  • Leverage investor interest against next investor, generate FOMO
  • Most investors like/expect pushback from great founders (they’re into a bit of S&M)
  • You have to instill the feeling, the fear, that you’ll be able to close the round without them
  • Fundraising is a numbers game, talk to many, MAAAAAAANY, +100
  • Fundraising is a game for adults, so lawyer-up (startup lawyer, not your family lawyer)
  • A SAFE Note is not 1:1 possible in DE, a CLA may be your next best bet (if you or the investor must), please do research and calculate your different dilution scenarios when choosing CLA terms BEFORE you commit to raising on it
  • Don’t ask for VC-money (unless you can show, at least in vague theory, a road to 100 Million ARR over the next 6-10 years)
  • IMO, „read decks“ are for lazy investors, requirement for GO grants, and for loser founders that don’t want investor meetings (you want to tease them into a meeting, not give them everything but the kitchen sink before your first date)
  • KISS, keep it simple stupid; in your terms, reverse vesting (DE), founder splits, cap table, etc
  • If you have insane traction, you can ignore all previous prompts and probably raise on that fact alone

PS: If you have a b2b Green Tech startup, the application for their next batch may still be open! You’ll get 25K non-diluted – and a chance to have me as one of the mentors (if you wish) at no extra cost to you.

PPS: if you are planning to raise a pre-seed, seed, or perhaps even a Series A financing round, check out my Pitching Masterclass to learn all you need to know to successfully raise; Time to get smart, time get funded!

All photos copyright Ignition.

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entrepreneurship, pitching, startup

Migrant Momentum

Recently I was honored to be invited to “Migrant Momentum“, an event focusing on immigrants and entrepreneurship during the Startup Week DUS to speak a bit on a panel about fundraising for early-stage startups and moderate one of the break-out sessions on fundraising hurdles and success metrics for fundraising for founders.

I had really no idea of what to expect, but it turned out to be one of those rare “lightning in a bottle” event where the atmosphere and the attitude of everybody participating was contagiously positive in the extreme.

Many thanks to the event organisers Avela Gronemeyer and Archita Fritz for creating such a pleasant and productive atmosphere!

And I wasn’t at all prepared for the feedback I received… Made me blush.

“[…] thank you so much for the passion, energy, expertise, and heart you brought to yesterday’s “Migrant Momentum”. We received unbelievable feedback from the “Investor Circles” – your authenticity, openness to honest talks, passion for your work, and your humanity was clearly felt.”
– A. Gronemeyer, Event Organiser

On the panel I spoke a bit about what investors are looking for and how to attract investor attention.
From my break-out session on fundraising hurdles and next steps to funding (turned out to be popular as it was 100% oversubscribed – which made it a time-management catastrophe… LOL!)
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Education, entrepreneurship, speaking, startup

Keynote @ Deutscher Akademischer Austausch-dienst (DAAD)

Recently I had the honor and pleasure to be invited to hold a keynote speech for Alumniportal by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).

I spoke a bit about five things I wished that I had known before starting out as a startup founder.

Here they are – in no particular order.

ChatGPT’d screenshot from the online event

About the DAAD:

The DAAD is the world’s largest funding organisation for the international exchange of students and researchers.

Since it was founded in 1925, around 3 million scholars in Germany and abroad have received DAAD funding. It is a registered association and its members are German institutions of higher education and student bodies. Its activities go far beyond simply awarding grants and scholarships. The DAAD supports the internationalisation of German universities, promotes German studies and the German language abroad, supports countries in the Global South in building and improving their higher education systems and advises decision makers on education, foreign science and development policy.

Continue reading →
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Education, entrepreneurship, startup

Sales & Marketing for Early-Stage Startups @ University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf (HSD)

Recently I was invited to hold my “Sales & Marketing for Early-Stage Startups” workshop at the University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf (HSD) for participants in their “Gründerzeit” program.

Spoiler alert: Sales & Marketing at the early stage of a startup isn’t what you think it is(if you are thinking it’s just like the kind of activities with the same types of goals that larger more established companies are doing, just with much less money and much less people).

If this sounds interesting to you for your educational institution or startup support program too, why not get in touch?

The Sales & Marketing Masterclass for Early-Stage Startups was created in 2017 and has been evolving ever since. It addresses the need for Early-Stage Startups, Students, and Startup Support Programs to better understand how and why sales and marketing for an early stage startup is radically different from the sales strategies and advertising methods of established companies – why what you learn in college or university do not readily apply to early stage startups.

This full day workshop consist of a theoretical part, a hands-on work & coaching part, and a presenting with feedback (peer review) part.

The Masterclass has been designed based on the fundamental practices from the startup world of today and has been evolving and maturing – constantly being updated with input and experience from participating startups.

The Sales & Marketing Masterclass for Early-Stage Startups goes into detail about how and why the things that work for established companies doesn’t work for the first years of a startup, why you’ll be hard pressed to become successful by copying what established companies do or by blindly implementing what you learned in school.

For both B2C and B2B startups, it describes an additional 18 channels for getting attention, customers, and traction – besides that of just paid advertising, and it provides a framework – a repeatable process – for continuously deciding, running and testing experiments to build and improve traction.

For B2B startups, the Masterclass also goes into detail about how to get your first pilot customers and how to treat the whole sales process fundamentally different from that of an established company and in ways that may at first sound counter-intuitive.

The primary goal for our customers of this Masterclass program is to make startups understand how to create traction for their startup, to prepare them with the knowledge and skills to control their fate with their own hands.

The secondary goal is to create awareness about what successful sales and marketing (aka getting traction) for early-stage startups actually looks like, to make first-time startup founders understand how it is different and why.

The third goal is to help early-stage startups (if applicable) further refine and develop their plan and strategy on their actual sales & marketing, by getting critical expert feedback on their contents of the deck, their strategies, and their thinking behind them.

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Education, entrepreneurship, pitching, startup

Pitching Masterclass @ the new Gründungs-fabrik Mönchen-gladbach

There’s a new place for people interested in doing their own thing in the state of NorthRhine-Westphalia: Gründungsfabrik Mönchengladbach – and recently I was invited as one of their first educational programs to host my Pitching Masterclass there!

My Pitching Masterclass was initially created to serve the needs of the Rheinland Pitch back in 2013 to help educate our regional founders – and has been constantly evolving ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served – and counting.

Until now, the Pitching Masterclass Startup Edition and Corporate Edition was only available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or startups lucky enough to be in an incubator or accelerator or corporate innovation program who decided to book me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.

Happy Pitching Masterclass customers…

Today, the Pitching Masterclass is also additionally available, both the Startup and Corporate Edition, to all startups and corporate innovators everywhere as on-demand eLearning at https://pitchingmasterclass.com, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download – also bookable in packages which additionally includes online mentoring & support vouchers for your teams.

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