Which hat do you wear while pitching to an investor?

As a startup entrepreneur, especially when you are at early stages end up performing multiple business roles depending up on a situation. You write a product code, interview tech business development or finance team, manage finances, do business planning and marketing strategies as well. In short, you have multiple hats to wear as business / situation demand. At early stage, whether you like it or not, you have no choice but to play these roles immensely as each one of them play an important aspect in shaping your entrepreneurship journey.

Understand your investor mindset

As a tech founder / co-founder, you are obsessed with the technology. You can go talking endlessly about technology, product architecture, load sharing, test results, uptime, backend, front end, UI, logic, platform, algorithm, and so on. You are super excited to talk about features, product roadmap. A good and fruitful conversation can happen only when other side of the person is equally interested in the same topic. Such conversations can go limitless. In turn, you both start liking each other because mindsets are matching. There is a chemistry between two of you and therefore there is a desire to engage with each other.

But in many pitches to investors, it does not go well. Because, investor (even if he is coming from tech background with good understanding of technology and domain), while listening to your pitch, he is wearing “Investor’s” hat. All he is trying to analyze is business, opportunity, scalability, problem you are solving, your customers, how big is the problem, competition and most important wealth creation. Is this the opportunity to make my investment grow by 10x, 50x or 100x. As a founder if you are not addressing these pointers, such conversation / pitch does not go well and that’s where there is disconnect.

Investors don't care whether your app is hosted on AWS or Azure. Such technicalities are not going to influence investors funding decision.

So how do you win the investor? Can you create the same chemistry here?

So advice to entrepreneurs (specially tech founders / co-founders), keep your tech hat at home. Talk business idea, market, customers, competition, scalability, team, wealth creation opportunity or anything which excites and makes a good sense to an investor to take his decision to next level and that’s the #TippingPoint for you.

Once the investor takes decision on investment front, he is surely going to wear his tech hat and discuss technology or he will put his tech colleague on the job to understand on the tech side of business. If there are any gaps here, same can be addressed easily. This will not have major impact on investment decision. But earlier will definitely have impact on investment decision.

I would love to hear from investors / VCs about their thoughts and comments here. Entrepreneurs, do share your thoughts as well. 

Still do you need help? Feel free to reach out to me - [email protected]

About Tipping Point - We are a Startup business management consultants providing advisory and consulting services to Startup promoters, angel networks and angels/VCs/ family offices in documentation, compliances, business processes, strategy planning, investor relations services and help them to reach to a Tipping Point and beyond. We engage with Startups from seed stage to series A/B and angels/VCs from investment to exit stage.