Attracting Investors From Cover to Cover
Blue In Co-Founder - Pradesh Raj shares his take on Pitch Decks.
In Omni Pitch newsletter today, we had the opportunity to speak to Blue In Co-Founder Pradesh Raj, a repeating founder who has founded and exited businesses that many aspiring founders aim to achieve. Having met Pradesh on a fateful networking opportunity, his enthusiasm and willingness to share from his experience in founding businesses valuing millions of dollars and transacted nine figure deals created an instant connection. Amongst the enthusiasm, his ability to close definitely stood out to this substack writer who aims to share what it takes to creating a winning pitch.
Top Three Things to Make an Impression
Cover Page | Founder’s Story | Numbers
From Pradesh’s sharing, the front cover, being the first thing an investor sees, should include a short and succinct sentence stating what the startup is all about. From his experience, a quick sentence would give him an idea of what the deck/company is about so that an investor would be prep going in. We see Being Succinct is emphasised in our interviews so far having seen it being repeated in our previous newsletter on being Succinct and Clear.
Now we have heard time and time again that early stage investors invest in the founders. Pradesh shares that what he would like to see in the founder’s background is his story, the opportunity to get to know you on a more personal level where your quirks or an interesting fact about you that would allow investors to know who you are outside of the company. This finding is actually very interesting to us because like many, we would gravitate towards accolades and achievements. So good news if you have something quirky like, if you’re powered by coffee (i.e. you drink 6 cups of coffee a day) to be included in your “Get to Know Me” slide might help creating a connection with the investor.
Any investment at any stage would require you to show your work (homework). In his experience, a founders’ number tells a lot about whether the founder has done enough research in knowing about the industry or more importantly the market’s demand. This, according to Pradesh is what helps creating an effective pitch deck, knowing your industry, market and numbers.
Reach for the Stars without Losing Touch with Reality
One of the common mistakes from the score of pitch decks he has gone through, is losing touch with reality. Being unrealistic, in our opinion too, would affect valuations, milestones, goals and amount to be raised. This would definitely turn investors away while they perform their own due diligence. One of the unrealistic common mistakes in pitch decks highlighted during our session was market capture/user generation. “If we only capture 1% of market, we would be valued at X billions”. While that’s true, user generation/market capture is harder than you think. From his sharing, customers today are not loyal, this leads to higher churn rates/drop out rates. What’s worse, is that the underestimation of customers’ willingness to change or being overly optimistic with the budget required to get the optimal number of users will cause companies to burn cash faster than expected.
Create an Impression First!
Pradesh also shares that decks should be short, due to the high numbers of pitch decks an investor gets, you want to create an impression quickly to want to speak to you. He shared that your pitch deck should be short and sweet. It should be crafted to speak to investors on the high level. In our understanding, it’s to get investors on board with your idea. Then supplemented with an investors’ deck, a deck where it is a little longer in content, to share more about numbers and the details of industry data or market data that helps you make your case.
Meaningful Qualities
Early on in our session with Pradesh he shared about founders being one of the top three things he look out for in a startup. He then shared meaning qualities would be the fact that he could learn about the business too rather than blindly investing. The founders should exude knowledge in the field as they are the backbone to bringing this company to life and moving it toward the stars. However, founders should be wary and avoid coming across as egoistic during knowledge sharing. Confidence is not about being egoistic.
Most importantly, it falls upon the shoulders of the founders to convince investors like our guest in this newsletter the trustworthiness of you as a founder and as a person in the pitching session.
"No virtue is more universally accepted as a test of good character than trustworthiness ." -Harry Emerson Fosdick
We come to an end to today’s newsletter with Pradesh’s sharing of two advice to entrepreneurs who has been repeatedly rejected for funding.
Something is not right - best to find out what it is? It can be the business model, the solution, the market, the monetisation, etc. The key is to find out what has gone wrong so that you could improve on it.
If after pitching to a large sample size and you’re still not getting funded or customers, perhaps your solution has no market fit. It may be a good for you too to let it go. (Pradesh shared this in consideration of the founders’ financials where sometimes, you would need to be realistic because you have bills to pay.)