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Of all the things that are critical when you pitch investors, properly presenting your vision might be the most important. If you present your vision the wrong way, investors won’t want to invest. If you present your vision the right way, you’ll find investors will be lining up to invest in your startup.
I should know. We had multiple investors pass on investing early on in our fundraising process. However, once we explained our vision the right way, we were able to raise our funding.
Why Your Vision Matters to Investors
When I first started raising money, I didn’t really understand how important explaining your vision is to investors. As a result, I talked too much about what we were doing today and not enough about where our company was going.
This created two problems for us:
1. It made the opportunity look smaller than it actually was.
In our case, I literally reduced the opportunity from a $60 billion end market to a $4 billion end market. That’s a huge difference!
2. There was no journey for investors to get excited about.
The pitch was honestly boring. It was something like, “Here’s this market we’re going to attack. We think we can do better than the competition. Here’s how big the opportunity is. Invest in us.”
Here’s the deal. Investors are human beings, not robots. Yes, they absolutely want to make money. However, they also want to invest in something that allows them to go on an exciting journey with you over the next several years.
Great visions sell the destination. Even if it seems impossible today, your job is to sell investors on the possibility of this becoming a reality.
You’re saying to investors, “Join me on this journey. Here are the steps we’re going to take along the way. And we’re going to make lots of money each step of the way. It’s going to be a hell of a ride. Are you in?”
In the rest of this article, I’m going to explain, slide by slide, how you do this. So let’s start with the first slide in our pitch deck…
