Finding the bottleneck
If you are struggling to get traction with your investor presentation, it is worthwhile to try to find out where the bottleneck is:
- Do investors understand what I am trying to do?
- Do investors understand that this is a big problem/opportunity?
- Do investors understand that someone can make a big business out of this?
- Do investors understand that I am the person who can make a big business out of this?
These are slightly different questions than the ideas entrepreneurs often have:
- My slides do not look "slick" or professional enough, let's add some colour
- The story flow is not completely right, let's talk about the market earlier
- We have not put in aggressive enough financial forecasts, let's bump it up to $100m
- We did not put in that Gartner total market number for 2016
- We are not mentioning the right buzzwords, let's add a few
- The deck is too long, let's cut it down to 5 slides by combining pages
- We should use Keynote or Prezi, PowerPoint is stale
- We should invest in a video clip
- The deck needs more animated slides
- AirBNB raised a lot of money, let's copy their pitch deck
Art: Edvard Munch, Self Portrait with a Bottle of Wine