Develop your early-stage pitch materials

Articulating Your Investor-Friendly Pitch and Finding Investors to Listen

Share v1 of your investment pitch
See next steps from this week to see exactly what this can include.

Building your Seed Round Materials and Communicating with Investors

Share your final investment pitch
See next steps from this week to see exactly what this can include.

Class Wrap-Up / Feedback

Additional Resources

- SpokenLayer Pitches at TechCrunch Disrupt
- ConditionOne TechStars Demo Day Pitch (poor audio quality - sorry)
- Watch: Dave Cohen of Techstars Talks about What Makes a Good Pitch ...starting at about 8:55 (until the end), David Cohen of Techstars talks about what makes a good pitch, using an actual pitch to illustrate. Warning - it is long!
Next Steps for this week...

This week is about laying the foundations to build your pitch materials.
1. Define the problem your venture is solving and what differentiates your company.
2. Articulate what motivates you to devote the next X years of your life to this company and problem.
3. Identify your competitors - both startups and big companies that might move in to your space.
4. Do your homework on investors and determine your short list of firms you'll pitch to, Why them?
Post in this Discussion for feedback from myself and other students! I'll pick some projects to give feedback on in the next office hours.
- How To Present to Investors - Paul Graham (of Y Combinator)
- How to Raise a $1m Seed Round - TechCrunch
- The Art of Raising Seed - TechCrunch
- How to Raise Your First Round - Chris Dixon (via Eric Stromberg)
- Fundraising Tips - Rob Go
- What Should I Send Investors? Pt 2 - Deck
- Notes on Raising Seed Financing - Chris Dixon
- How to Nail the Elevator Pitch - Mark Suster
Next Steps for this week...

This week we'll take the foundations laid last week to actually build the materias you can use to pitch with.
1. Write a paragraph explaining the company and team - something you can use in email.
2. Build a single slide on what differentiates you and why you all in (you + investors)
3. Build a 5-10 slide deck presenting:
- What you are building (product explanation)
- Why you are building it (problem statement)
- How you're going to get there (plan, team)
- Who else matters (competition)
- Why it matters (opportunity, market size)
- BONUS: Come up with a very basic set of financial projections (pro tip: I pay more attention to the costs than the revenue. And I look at revenue and user growth basically to judge "are you crazy..."
Share in this Discussion for feedback from myself and fellow students. I'll choose some of the best projects for a 1-on-1 consultation with me.
For This Week:

I'll be hosting a final office hours sesion to wrap up the class for anyone who's interested on Monday, October 8th at 6 pm est.

I'll be announcing the winning pitches, going over a few additional pitches if any students tuning in want live feedback, and answering any questions that you have.

James Knight

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