Questions

Instead of calling it "comedy", aim for humor. Humor that supports a key discovery helps to anchor that insight in the investor's mind. I've coached many pitches, and find that when presenters are nervous they try to go for an improvised laugh, thinking it will cut the tension. However, in most ...

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A good deck doesn't sell a terrible story, but a bad deck can ruin a great story. Your primary goal should be to distill your story down to 10 slides max, with as *few words as possible* on each slide. Images, product shots and graphs are all more impactful than words. A good outline is as fol...

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Avoid buzzwords: - every founder thinks their idea is disruptive/revolutionary - every founder says their financial projections are conservative Instead: - explain your validation & customer traction - explain the assumptions underlying your projections Avoid: - focusing extensively on the prod...

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I heard of a startup that recently launched called http://sketchdeck.com that has become pretty popular for fundraising decks. Happy to do a dry run of your pitch with you in a call.

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Probably not but not because it's impossible to raise on a deck. Raising based purely on a deck almost only happens by seed funds backing an established team. In this case, the raise is much larger (usually between 1 to 2 million). Without a technical founder, and without you both having a tra...

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I'd be happy to help, I've advised many early stage startups on their pitch decks. Feel free to send a Dropbox link to your pitch deck so that I can go through it beforehand, best, Lee

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Create an investor list who have a history of investing in similar lines. It may lead to deep research. Reach out to them via mails/calls for an introductory call. I am sure someone might be interested in your product but patience is the key. I helped a similar client in the past with some back g...

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Alexa is probably the worst tool you could use specially if you are trying to gauge international traffic. Try something more advanced like similarweb.com to measure traffic volume and geo breakdown. Appannie.com will help you to analyze apps on itunes and google playstore.

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I like to take a rule from the Steve jobs playbook and use simple circles... one larger than the other but no more than 2. your most immediate target (realistic reachable) and one of the "enemy" competitor company. or overall untapped market cap. **for this to be effective you must provide as acc...

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The leading players are Zendesk, GrooveHQ, and FreshDesk. I have used all of these and my vote goes to Zendesk. I talked about it as a case study for a documentation task, see http://www.vinishgarg.com/2014/09/kb-case-study-pain-points-and-analysis/. I am also co-founder of @In23Hours where we ...

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