# Pitching to investors Source: [Michael Seibel on pitching investors](https://youtu.be/Q-YBCehpgpc) ## 30 second pitch - What does your company do? (i.e., product) - [[100b Howler is a shareable audio platform]]. - How far along are you? - A working iOS prototype is on the App Store with about 100 users. - How big is the market? (i.e., growth potential) - Example: how big is the voice messaging market? Maybe as big as both WhatsApp and email markets. Possibly bigger as more people talk than read/write. - How much traction do you have? (i.e., growth) - Example: launched in January and we are growing x% month over month in sales or revenue or customers. ## 2 minute pitch: - Start with 30 second pitch. - Unique insight (**two sentences max**): - example: what’s your secret sauce or competitive advantage? - An opportunity to tell investors what you are doing well that others are missing. - how will your company make money/charge users? - Examples: advertising, or direct sales, or in-app add-ons. - Team: - Try to do two things: highlight the impressive things done in the past. Avoid saying PhDs etc. - Ideally, between 2-4 members in founding team. And how many technical vs business people? Ideally, more engineers. - How do we know each other? Preferably personally or professionally. - How you met? - Ideally, you can all show you are working on the thing full-time. ## The big ask: - Are you raising on convertible note Or are you raising on a safe? - What is the “cap of that safe”. - What is the minimum check size you want? - Basically, you want to show you have done your homework. ## Features of investor pitch - Jargon-free - Use language they understand - Avoid marketing language - Where to pitch? - Not on website. - Not for customers (see the section below). - Only in pitch deck. ## Example of bad and Good investor pitch: - Bad pitch’s Google is a platform for organising the world’s information. - Google is a new type of search engine. With Google, you type what you want to find into a search box on our website, hit enter, and you get an ordered list of websites you want. These sites are more relevant because we use a page-ranking algorithm depending on how other websites link to them. # Customer Pitch - Features - Use jargon to build credibility. - Get the customer to talk about their problem more than you. - Tehn figure out how to solve that problem they are having. - where to pitch? - Website - Sales call - FAQ - User interviews - What customers care about: - funcitonality - On boarding process - Pricing - Does it solve their problem # Another reference from YC on statsups Source: [*How To Evaluate Startup Ideas*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOtCl5PU8F0&t=86s) - Based on the Problem-Solution-Insight premise of evaluating (and therefore pitching) a startup described by Alex Hale at YCombinator's startup school session. I have screenshotted the main slides over at [[REFERENCE StartingUp.pdf]].