How can you determine the best time to pitch your idea to investors?

There is no 'perfect' time to pitch anyone. However, knowing your audience and how they could help you can allow you to get the most from each interaction. Talking to someone as an advisor? Be prepared to answer lots of questions - and if you're not getting any, ask them lots of questions. Talking to a potential investor (of any type or stage) Ask for advice first. Not simply, 'What do you think', but more nuanced inquiries about your business model, market research, customer validation - all that good stuff. Then, always ask for a follow-on connection. "Who else can I speak to about this idea?" As mentioned by others - don't let advice move you too far. Take it in, look for patterns in what others tell you, and react accordingly.

One question that I'd always recommend asking when talking to a venture investor is "What stage are you at with your fund deployment?" If they're early in the deployment process, they might be looking for more sure things that could potentially get a relatively quick mark up. Mid-deployment, they will be trying to stick close to their mandate. At the later stages, they could potentially be looking to take more risk as the core of the portfolio is likely already taking shape. Understand how you fit into those stages as compared to their existing portfolio.

Driven by COVID and the resulting e-commerce boom, the creator economy was once as hyped as AI is today. But now that markets have cooled, and the realities of these businesses are laid bare, we see that only a few investors have a deep thesis in the space (eg. Andrew Chen from a16z comes to mind). Therefore, alongside important factors such as understanding how the investor makes investment decisions, how many total investment the fund plans on making, and how many investments the fund has left to make, it's vitally important to know whether an investor is a good fit for your idea by reaching out to creator economy companies that they have already invested in to understand whether the investor's values and vision align with yours.

To determine the best time to pitch your idea to investors, conduct thorough market research, create a compelling business plan, build a prototype, establish some traction, and ensure you have a clear, scalable growth strategy. Timing is crucial, and a well-prepared, data-backed pitch is more likely to succeed.

In my experience, it's important to know what is the typical ticket size of your target investor, most importantly if your targets are angels. Don't be afraid to ask them. But beforehand, determine what is the minimum investment you will consider. So that both sides expectations are at least aligned on that point before having the conversation.

Validation can vary depending on the stage of your company, and the expectations of investors who focus on a given stage will be adjusted accordingly. For example, a pre-revenue SEIS company in the life sciences space may be working toward a clinical pilot, and have secured some innovate UK grant funding. A SaaS company raising a series A round however would need to have significant Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), low churn, and ideally a broad customer base and growing pipeline. Ask advisors around you what good traction looks like for your business and stage, and how to best showcase it.

If you are raising investment and you are an SEIS/EIS elligible business, be mindful of tax year ends - a busy time for all funds, and generally speaking, means that funds are committed and VCs are focussed on closing all deals and not necessarily sourcing or looking at new opportunities. April/May is a time for gathering breath, but don't expect pacy VC activity. If a fund is not a tax fund, they tend not to be constrained by tax year end activity, and so take deals as they come and run at the pace appropriate to syndicatae and close the deal. Needless to say, December is always chaotic, and August is quiet for summer holidays!

Practice, practice, practice - a mantra I never tire of! Accelerator programmes place a lot of emphasis on this, but it's important to be clear about the expectations VCs have in attending these events. Feedback sessions tend to be safer spaces to practice and ask for feedback, versus showcases and formal competitions or pitch events. Make sure you have a broad pool of people you get feedback from, and it can be useful to curate your advisors carefully - do they have relevant experience in your sector? Do they actively invest, or have a background in investment? There is a saying that goes, Ask for Investment and you get advice - the inverse is also true! So build a network, be humble and ask questions.

Testing the waters is a great way to gain feedback, fine tune, uncover your red flags and the hard questions you need to answer... and potentially gain mentors and advisors that like what your doing but don't think you are ready for their investment. It is also a great way to gather interest for your seed round as you work to package and improve your opportunity for investors.

Iteration is absolutely key when raising investment. You need to be flexible to changes in your market, otherwise you might appear unknowledgeable, or unadaptable. Ultimately, your mission and reason for being shouldn't really change too much, if it is well thought out, founded and researched, but execution plans will. As for adjusting your pitch - I agree with this to some extent, but if you are saying wildly different things to different people, I would hazard to suggest you may not be curating your approaches well enough. As a caveat, if your business is highly technical or specialised, you may *deliver* your pitch differently to sector-agnostic investors versus those in your space.

Lack of follow up is probably one of the biggest reasons entrepreneurs don't raise all the capital they seek. Angel investors are people and they have a life and the life does not center around deciding to invest in your business, unless they are in an network with a firm timeline. Sometimes an investor may be interested but needs a liquidity event or has a personal matter they are engrossed in, when they are ready to invest, if you haven't followed up and provided progress reports, answered their questions, they will have forgotten about you and be on to the next shiny deal. Follow up and Follow through is critical... with respect and humility... until you get the NO.

A few Dont's that as VCs we really hate! - Don't email everyone on the investment team separately and incrementally. It comes across as rude and disrepectful of people's time, if the whole team ends up spending time reading your deck, before the CRM highlights its been logged and is being looked at elsewhere. - Don't go higher up the chain when you get a no. If you got a no, there's a reason for it. It may not be something you like to hear or agree with, but usually there is always something to be learned from rejection; your pitch deck needs adjusting based on their feedbach, or perhaps you do not fit the fund's criteria now, or at all, and therefore your approach was made either too early or incorrectly alltogether.

In my experience, you need to be targetting investors constantly until such time as you don't need any further outside investment. One person at a minimum in the team should be tasked with managing this outreach, and informing the others in the team every week, and I mean every week, as to progress of every lead. Have a cloud based tracker that everyone can understand and follow. Every team member should be doing their best to also find leads, and not just leaving it all to the member tasked with managing the outreach. The pressure to convince investors to commit, particularly if you're trying to fund losses, is insane, but you cannot take your foot off the throttle. Assume your conversion rate of turning targets into investors is 1% !!