How to attract investments: 10 tips from VC professionals

With so many companies vying for the attention of venture capitalists, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. To help entrepreneurs navigate this competitive landscape, privateequitylist.com asked VC professionals for their best advice on how to fundraise effectively. Whether you're a first-time founder or an experienced entrepreneur, these tips can provide valuable guidance on how to make your pitch more compelling and attract the attention of investors.

Raja Skogland, Scale-up Advisor, Serial entrepreneur & Investor in 70+ companies:

"Build relationships with investors, before you need investors. It will be the opportunity to understand the psychology of investors and the "problems" they are trying to solve for their shareholders. Do that and you will be able to drastically accelerate your fundraising process"

Raja Skogland

Leila Oliveira, Campaign Manager at Birchal

"Treat your fundraising process like an enterprise sales cycle: know which target audience (investor profile) makes the most sense to target, be thoughtful about your outreach, and keep an organized CRM to manage follow up. Investors are people so marketing and sales strategies are very welcome here"

Leila Oliveira

Shmuel "Sam" Eisenberg, Co-Founder at Design For Decks

"Investors receive 1000s of decks and look for reasons to quickly discard them. If they can't tell what you do right away, that is a surefire way to get rejected. In your first communication (or on your first slide), your audience needs to quickly and clearly understand what it is you do- here is the formula we use in-house for this:
[Company Name] helps [audience] + [solution] + [how]"

Shmuel "Sam" Eisenberg

Borys Musielak, Founding Partner at Smok.vc, investing in top early stage founders from the CEE region

"Build a story that engages investors. In the early stage, a story that makes sense sells better than anything else. Make it personal. Investors want to understand why you came up with this idea, how you got it and what's your insight into the industry you're about to disrupt. Being ahead of the trends in a quickly growing new market always helps"

Borys Musielak

Barak Peled, Founder at Dossier Research

"Early stage (pre-seed/seed/A) best tip is to build your own community of angels. You’d be surprised by just how many ppl in your immediate circle; neighbours, sporting teammates, parents and teachers from your kids' school, people who taught you, past and present bosses etc would love to back you. It only takes 20 ppl with 5k each and you’ve got your first 6-figure round sorted! 

Later stage-don’t waste time doing it yourself you have a business to run, hire a good research agency, target the right funds and fund managers and build a compelling case"

Barak Peled

Alex Shandrovsky, BD Advisor Fresh Start, Proveg and Fusion VC

"What we see from our clients' success is a constant commitment to having numerous conversations simultaneously. Never be single-threaded with just one investor - perceived competition creates urgency and drives evaluations"

Alex Shandrovsky

Joerg Sperling, Independent PE and VC Consultant

"Do not overestimate the expertise and the patience of your investors. Or in other words: most business angels spend 2-3 minutes flipping through your pitch deck. Don’t make it too complicated, make it exciting and to the point. Most business angels do not have the domain expertise of your segment. Means don’t use acronyms and do not assume BA do immediately “get it”. Use simple analogies, and simple language to explain what you do"

Joerg Sperling

Orr (Luis) Shemtov, VC, founder of Lunar Ventures

"If you can tell a great authentic story about why you are going to build a generational company (and why it’s this company you’re building now) find the investor who cares about your space and reach out"

Orr (Luis) Shemtov

Lorde Astor West, Managing Member RadHash.ai

"Create an Ideal Investor Profile. Get a CRM, target and prospect only that profile, and invest your time wisely by strategically using an organic outreach approach that incorporates a personal message for each investor"

Lorde Astor West

Gian Seehra, Founder and CEO, overseen over $300M worth of investment as a founder, investor and advisor

"Getting funding is not about your product, it's about people, and especially a human-to-human connection with that specific investor. So everything you do should be about how you can make that person want to invest in you, not your company"

Gian Seehra

Attract investors effectively with these tips and don't forget to use our database to search around 6000 PE&VC funds, 1600 incubators and accelerators and 23000 investor contacts. Start now here: https://privateequitylist.com/search