Investor Pitch Feedback

For our final day of Week2Work, our one week fundraising sprint with SeedLegals, we were joined by Paula Vivoli, Investor at Speedinvest, and Ella Wales Bonner, Investor at JamJar who helped 10 founders live workshop their pitches.

Pitching, deck creation and answering investors questions isn’t easy, and here are the top tips to help you speed up your fundraising round.

1. Show passion. If you don’t care about your startup, why should the investor? Investors need to see that you live, eat and breathe your startup, so don’t be afraid to show you really, really believe in what you’re doing.

2. Clarity is key. Paula summed this up perfectly “If you had a billboard in Piccadilly Circus, how would you describe your startup in 10 words?” What your startup does needs to be super, super clear. Investors should be able to understand this within the first few slides.

3. Buzzwords really do add to your valuation. This is not a reason to say you're a blockchain, Web3, metaverse startup if you aren’t, but if you are, don’t hide it. Investors love new, hot markets.

4. Looks do matter. Investors look at a couple hundred decks per week. Making yours clean and beautiful is an easy way to stand out, and makes the investor’s job a little bit more fun. Simple tools like Canva mean you don’t need to spend lots of money or time to get this done, but investing in a deck designer may still be worth it.

5. Get the investor excited. You want the investor to leave your pitch thinking about all the opportunities your startup has to dominate the market. As a founder, it’s your job to create a compelling vision for the company, and get the investor to feel it too. Sharing the impact on users, and the future roadmap is a great way to do this.

6. Keep it simple. Remember the one things you want investors to take away from each slide, and make that really obvious on your deck. Too much information on a slide could mean you’ve lost the gold amongst the words.

7. Focus on retention. B2C investors love businesses that consumers love. Build your story around retention and loyalty, both how you have it, and how you’ll continue to build it.

8. Remember the business model. Often as consumer focused company, you’re likely focusing on growth and market awareness before revenue, but investors still need to see your plans for revenue so they can see how they’ll get a return.

Follow Paola here and Ella here to keep updated.