How to attract investments: 10 tips from VC professionals

"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"

"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"

"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]"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"

"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"