Transcript
When you’re creating the perfect pitch deck. You need to get the sense of who am I presenting? So very often it’s about, okay, start with why if you have found a solution to waste management, what is this particular solution so interesting? What does it mean to you, to your family? Why did you get the ideas? I mean, you need to get a sense of why is this idea come up, particular, let’s say waste management, you will be competing with lots of other solutions, but you may have the best solution or the most interesting, or you may just be the one that will succeed because the investor sense why you have done it, the needs that you’ve done it. So I think that’s a very important thing to get a sense of the idea and the person behind the idea very clearly as well, but not in a banal way, because there’s also this sort of, you have to have a sort of compelling story, but it just has to be not banal because investors have heard so many of those as well by now.
10 years ago, you’d be able to get away with a much more, kind of personal, “I show my son drawing a painting and it really sort of said, okay, we need to do something for the kids. And I developed this, I had to do something”, that’s just not an interesting story anymore. So you need to link your personal motivation, really clearly to here’s the market lead. And this is the testing you’ve done. So you need to back up the professional conviction, why you did it with a lot of evidence data, and hopefully also testing as well, because then you make the move to, I have a personal drive to, I went out and investigated the market for this particular idea that is my startup as well. So that’s very important as well, back it up with a sound sort of, you don’t need to have a full market understanding, but as an investor, you need to see that this is a company that’s ready to do the hard work, that understands what it means to do a market analysis, to understand what it means to do a competitor assessment.
As you develop your company, you will do a much more rigid in depth work, but they need to see that you understand what it takes to do all that work, and you have a grasp of it as well. And then the whole testing and speaking with the customers, getting out there, getting the sales and do that as much as you can. And then pitch your ideas to your friends. There are some startups that don’t want to talk about the ideas to anybody because they’re afraid the ideas will get stolen. And some investors maintain that “don’t speak to anybody”, but it’s really wrong. You should speak about your idea all the time, both because that will mean you will practice because people ask questions and you will get over the nervousness, but also because you will get feedback all the time.
And it’s actually very hard to steal ideas. And if you’re very afraid that somebody will steal it, get a patent as quickly as you can for what you do, and then wait for telling anybody, but make a plan for getting a patent and then start talking about your ideas. Because you develop your presentation skills, you also get feedback that you take on board and you generally push yourself.
I think as a startup, you have to pledge to yourself that you have to make a plan for how you want to follow up from investment meetings and investment talks because there is not a natural follow-up. So you have to create that natural follow-up for yourself, and I think actually that’s a very good exercise to do. That if you use the pitch that you sent, that pitch deck afterwards. Maybe you send a revised pitch deck because they made some good observations.
It has some good ideas. So it shows that you’ve taken on board their input and their feedback into your pitch deck. If they suggested other investors or companies or market analysis that you need to do or things to include like an advisory board that you didn’t have, show that some actions you are taking to follow that up. So when you are following-up, follow-up with something that shows you’ve taken action on things they’ve said, that you have moved beyond the initial meeting with them. I think that’s always very good. And of course, follow-up with open to say, you’re happy to meet again, and you’re happy to bring maybe other team members, or if you know, there’s some big events on the radar that’s interesting in the field that you operating in within the health space, I suggest that you meet up, let them know that you’ll be attending this and this conference, this and this event and let them know that you’ll be there and you hope to meet them again as well.
And if they’re not aware of that particular event, you’ve done them a service as well to let them know. So think of opportunities where you will have time to chat again, and it may not be in a formal meeting, but it could be in a lot of other contexts.
Something we do with startups in the foundation as well is to encourage them to do reflection diaries, because that’s actually a huge learning exercise in planning your week ahead and then reflecting on whether you achieved your goals. So for every startup working on their idea, I suggest that they use reflection diaries. So, which is that you sit down every Friday, you write down: “Next week, I will be doing this, I will be speaking with X and Y, this is how I want to do it.” And then you reflect back on the week. Did I succeed with speaking to X and Y if I did, what did it bring if I didn’t, why did it not succeed?
And you just write that down. You don’t have to think a lot about that, but that forces you into activity that forces you into reflection. And you will realize after six months that you’ve done these reflection diaries, you both matured your ideas, you actually progressed a lot because sometimes as a startup, you feel that you’re not going anywhere, or you don’t really have any meetings. And then you can go back and see what happens. So that’s very good to keep a log, like a log diary of your activities and of your plans. And just make that an exercise that you integrate in your work.
