These are my notes on what critiques and training points after each pitch this morning.
The Three M’s you must convey:
Market Demand
Market Size and Structure
Margin Analysis
- Explain the problem you’re solving in your Pizazz statement so they know what your business is trying to solve.
- Show/Explain your marketing research to show your 3 M’s. Backup your business plan with that research.
- An investor will invest in a B idea with an A management team more often than they will a A idea with a B management team.
- Give the Pain and the Cure in 30 seconds.
- Explain what you need investment money for and how much
- DON’T make number mistakes like ‘We’re going to be in 5 states’ and then list 4. Investors will think you don’t know your stuff enough.
- If you don’t have historical revenue, make sure that you are showing strong on your future revenue
- Cover scalability, how will your employee needs compare to your accelerating revenue?
- Make sure you cover what your revenue margins are going to be
- Know your audience and what investors they like – if you don’t know, don’t be too over zealous about who your funders are.
- Make sure you spotlight some of your successes
- Having your software less than 99% complete can be a problem because the last 15% is usually the presentation side and most developers don’t like coding that.
- Make sure your financial models standup to whatifs
- For your financials you should be using QuickBooks data for historical information and use that data to plug into Excel for projections
- Make sure you’ve done dilligence on your partners or potential partners – you could be partnering with someone who will damage your reputation