Demystifying the numbers behind your early-stage fundraising
Published in
12 min readMar 10, 2023
As any seasoned entrepreneur will tell you, raising capital for a startup is never easy, regardless of the stage or maturity the business is in — and some may even say it is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do!
But if you want to play, a great and well thought-through investment pitch is an essential first step to get your foot in the door. It needs to land 3 key points:
- A compelling story: to enable your potential investors understand how you see the world today and tomorrow, framing you vision and shaping your unique perspective. This is about ‘why’ your start-up matters
- A believable strategy: to demonstrate practical thinking and planning on the activities needed to bring that vision to live, and quantifies what the upside could look like if are successful in realising the vision.
- A clear ask: to outline how much capital you want and what share of the equity you’ll part with, backed up by a solid understanding of the potential future valuation and expected return on investment.
If just one of these three points is missing or doesn’t hit the mark, you’ll typically be shown the door pretty quickly by potential investors. It can be hard for first-time founders to know what might have been off…
