You’ve been slaving away, creating your product and company while bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders. Now it’s time to take your company to the next level. You’ve reached out to your network for investor contacts, and now the all-important meeting with investors is booked. You have three weeks to prep. What do you do?
Investors can be tough, and you want to make sure you can roll with everything that is asked during your pitch presentation. For the novice, investor questions may seem perplexing, challenging, and hard to predict. Eventually you’ll discover there is limited universe of questions to be asked.
I have been through four fundraises, through good times and bad (see my post: 25 Ways Investors Will Reject Your Startup). I have found that while no entrepreneur has the best answer to all of the questions below, having a good prepared responses and a firm understanding of the 10 topics below make all the difference. While all of the questions below may not tie perfectly to your business (it primarily focuses on web and mobile companies), most of this applies widely and should help you prepare effectively for that pitch session.
1. Know Your Company: What You Do
This one should be a no-brainer for most founders. You essentially are the company. You live it, breathe it, and like it or not, sleep it too. In spite of this, many founders don’t have their elevator pitch streamlined. They’re too in the weeds.
There is a short window to pique the investor’s attention and the company intro is the time to do it. If you don’t grab their attention at the get-go, it’s all over. So make sure you have succinct and compelling answers to the following questions:
2. Know Your Team: Who You Have and Who You Need
Having a strong understanding of your team’s unique attributes, core strengths, and weaknesses will be critical to convey during your conversation. If you’re dealing with most smart investors, they will actually care more about the team than the technology (as strange as that sounds). In your conversation, it will be important to articulate a) why your team is uniquely positioned to win and b) that you have the self awareness to plan for hiring additional players (to fill voids in skill set and bandwidth) and c) have a sound plan of who you are going to hire, and how you are going to attract top talent. Here are some questions you should be prepared to answer:
3. Differentiation and Competitive Landscape: What Makes You Stand Out?
You are building something amazing and unique, of course! But much as you might see it that way, you need to succinctly convey this uniqueness and demonstrate how you’re going to win amongst a sea of competitors (many who have 100-1000X the resources of your team) is a challenge, but will be required to get the attention of investors. And it will be important to discuss your unique advantages over the competition. Be aware that “Why couldn’t Google just do it?” is a classic question. Here is what you need to know:
4. Product and Company Strategy: What You’re Building
Many founders are great at thinking big and have a clear vision of where their startup will be in five years and billions of dollars later. What makes the difference is whether you have a strong product/company strategy to tactically get there. One worthwhile exercise is to lay out a release roadmap of key initiatives (by quarter). Ask yourself, is there logic to the staging of the company and product initiatives? Are key metrics assumptions, resourcing, and value appreciation milestones baked into the plan? This will further substantiate your raise amount and your financial assumptions. Here are some more questions to challenge you on this subject:
5. Acquisition and Activation: If You Build It, How Will They Come?
You may have the best product in the world, but unless you can convince people to use it, no one will care. Having a clear strategy for driving acquisition and activation is critical to getting users in an efficient manner. Don’t worry if you don’t know exactly how you plan to get to 10 million users. What’s important is that you have a clear sense of how you are chipping away at the challenge by showing metrics focusing on optimization of visits, then signups, then active users, and eventually monetize-able users.
Be able to easily explain the logic of your process in order to reassure investors. And you should have your current metrics locked in your mind to show you are on top of your data. Here are some questions you will hear on the subject:
6. Engagement: What Will People Do With Your Product Once They Arrive?
Do you have 5 million visitors who only visit one page and bounce, or do you have 10 thousand rabid users whose visits last more than 28 minutes per session? Each product/company has different ways they engage users and the optimization of your product can vary. Talk about how you engage your users to maximize value. Value can be calculated in a variety of ways (user utility, lifetime value, revenue/visit). Describe what engagement you are optimizing for, where you are today, and how you will continue to optimize this metric. Here are some questions you can expect:
7. Retention: After They Have Come and Gone, Will They Return?
Investors tend to have an interest in the lifetime value of your users. For many companies, the more the user visits, the more that can be made. If you are paying for users, ideally you can show that you make more per user than you spend to acquire them. Nonetheless, knowing how you measure retention and a grasp on your plans to improve this metric (in relation to your lifetime user value) will help you greatly on the topic of retention. Here are some questions to test your knowledge:
What is your daily active users / monthly active user ratio for both registered cohort and all visitors? – (many VCs have jumped on the bandwagon and ask this question because Andrew Chen mentioned it on Techcrunch)
8. Revenue: How are You Going to Create a $Billion Business?
Don’t stroll into an investor’s office without a monetization strategy. Most likely, you are not Instagram. Some of the largest value appreciation milestones you can plan for include initial substantive revenue, positive unit economics (making more per user than you spend to acquire them), and the holy grail - profitability. Separately, it will be good paint the picture of how big your business can be and where the revenue will come from (your customers). Here are the questions you will be asked:
9. Funding
Funding is one of the last topics discussed in a typical investor meeting. You are almost through. Having a firm grasp on what you want to raise (and how long it lasts), how you plan to use the money, and the key milestones you will achieve are very important. If you have done your homework elsewhere (financial model, hiring plan, company strategy) the numbers here should roll right onto the page. Here are the questions you will get from investors on the topic of funding:
10. Know Yourself
I have seen countless Quora questions asking about what to wear, how to act, and what to do to impress investors. The most important thing you should know and be comfortable with is yourself. Know your strengths and also acknowledge your weaknesses. Note that nobody can do everything well, and you are most likely already extraordinary. Make sure to convey your infectious enthusiasm and passion. This will matter more than a perfectly polished “presentation.”
I end this post with my favorite presentation from Dave McClure (Master Chief at 500 Startups): Startup Viagra – How to Pitch a VC.Now that you know the questions you will be asked, this is a fantastic distillation of how to build your pitch deck.
[video]
“Ask not what you can do for your Board – Ask what your Board of Directors can do for your company.”
“It sure seems like everyone in finance I know all of a sudden wants to do a startup. They may miss their pay once on this side of the grassy field.”
I deeply subscribe and seek to embody the attributes of the Creative Leader. This leadership philosophy has proven to be the better long-term way to drive:
“Being a startup founder ruins you. You can’t have a real job ever again.” — Dave McClure
[video]
“Focusing on your core strength applies to both fitness and startups.”
“Utilize data, user feedback, and experts as tools to sharpen your gut reaction…but not to dictate your direction.”
“Doing a startup is like running a marathon…a marathon with an unknown distance. Make sure to get the support from your fans and supporters along the way and pace yourself. Oh yeah, and you will most likely be running up-hill most of the time.”
“The more you have experienced, the more you can experience.” — Dan Goodwin, Entrepreneur in Residence at IDEO
“Ideas are worthless. The art is in the execution. If you are worried about someone stealing your idea, what will be the barriers to entry once you launch?”