Overview

As a budding entrepreneur or technocrat you have a great idea and now you are ready to take it to the next stage. So now the question is, how do you best sell your idea to get the support for your ideas growth?

You start off by creating a solid business plan and investor presentation.

Investor presentation

There are a number of excellent resources on preparing presentation for prospective investors. A well prepared presentation and great delivery are critical to your financing success. You should plan on no more than 20 slides for your first presentation. You should plan on a 20 min – 30 min delivery with the balance of your meeting for Q&A. Your ability to manage the meeting time is an indicator of your management capability. These guidelines will serve you well for a meeting with virtually any angle group or venture capital firm.

While the specifics of your presentation will differ with the nature of your business, the following guidelines will address what virtually all early stage investors wish to assess.

Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of building what is primarily a product presentation. You should force yourself to keep the product discussion to just a couple of slides. This presentation needs to be focused on the building of a company – of which the product is a foundational element. This is often a difficult mental transition for entrepreneurs to make – see the company building opportunity, not the product! You can't go wrong with this outline:

Company Background

One or two pages summary that profiles the company, product, sales & marketing, market opportunity, and financing overview. The object is to provide a snapshot of the company and to "tell them what is exciting about your company"

Vision/Mission or Elevator Pitch

This should be a very simple statement of why the company has been formed and how it's going to change the world. This should be no more than several sentences long.

Problem/Solution Scenario

All products start with the definition of problem - a pain point in the market that it addresses. A well articulated problem and a well articulated solution will set the stage for the rest of your presentation.

Market Opportunity

All good company-building opportunities start with an attractive market opportunity – in market size and growth. The pain you articulated earlier should translate into a market opportunity. Quoting analyst market numbers that are not particularly focused will not convince an investor that you understand the market opportunity. You should challenge yourself to try and built a bottoms-up analysis, with assumptions, that builds an attractive market opportunity. Other issues you may wish to address are customer switching costs, willingness of customers to buy from startups, power of incumbents, etc. Competition can be addressed at this point but is more meaningful after a product context has been established.

Product / Technology Description

This is the opportunity to talk about the product. Talk about what's disruptive and innovative. Define the value propositions. This section does not need to be half of the presentation. Plan on no more than just a few slides.

Competitions

Direct and Indirect. Current, future & framework for analysis. 

Current & Sustainable Competitive Advantage

IP is helpful, but usually not sufficient. Strong know-how, network effects, high switching costs, long-term contracts, learning curve benefits, and capturing key distribution channels can all be used to build powerful competitive advantage and entry barriers for others. First mover advantage in itself is usually not sufficient unless it can be used to accomplish some of the above mentioned entry barriers.

Business Model

Manner in which you develop repeatable & profitable business. Discuss capital efficiency. Discussion of supporting models – operating, product development, and sales and marketing will demonstrate your command of the business and the business model.

Go-to-Market Strategy

This slide(s) should be dedicated to how you plan to cross the chasm, obtain your first reference customer(s), first 500K users,etc. Discuss target market strategy, sales & distribution, partnering, pricing & promotion.

Customer Traction/Pipeline

Show your pipeline and that you have an organized process for developing customers and know how to advance them through a sales process.

Team & Human Resources

Brief Bio's – companies, specific positions, key accomplishments & education.

Execution Timeline

Bring realism and believability to your plan. Discuss risk factors. Human resources. Spend rates. Key milestones, etc. How far will the money you are raising last? What reserve will you have if key milestones slip? Have you built adequate time margin into your next round financing? Does the financing timeline interleave with your key milestones?

Five-year Product Market/Technology Roadmap

What does the future look like? Do you have follow-on markets. How big? Competitors? Technology and product development requirements? Risk factors? Etc.

Five-year Pro-forma

Highlight the key metrics. While the Pro-forma will often get cursory review in an early stage company, it still makes certain statements about your command of the business, your vision, the size company that may be built, your expectation on cash break

Financing Requirements & Financing Scenario

Provide a timeline of your expected financing rounds, and how large you expect those rounds will need to be.

Investment Thesis

Make the potential investor's job easy and summarize why we should invest. How would you summarize the deal and compelling reason to invest if you had to do it in one foil?

Backup Information

Your backup information should include evidence of whatever key facts you are claiming. If you claim you can definitely design something for $1M in 12 months, you might support it with schedules, engineering analysis, comparison to similar efforts and 3rd party expert opinions. If you claim there is a $100M un-served market opportunity, you might support it with market data and verifiable customer testimonials.

Your backup material should also include an operating plan, including detailed milestones and monthly financials for the period supported by the funding you are requesting, plus key milestones and quarterly financials to the exit point. The financials should generally include an income statement, balance sheet and funds flow statement.
Your backup info should also include resumes for all key team members

High quality backup material will allow your deal to move ahead much more quickly.