Improving your funding chances

Raising funds for your start-up is probably the most distracting, time consuming and hardest things you will do as an entrepreneur.

It’s also the best thing you will do because aside from the obvious benefits of being able to attract great talent and deploy your product a lot quicker to a higher standard and to more potential customers, you get a huge amount of useful feedback.

Roboinvest has gone through several pivots based on feedback from people who I have put it in front of.

Our executive summary has been reworked after every meeting with an investor, because you always come away with something.

I have likely gone through over 20 executive summary iterations, and each time it improved to meet the feedback and concerns of the previous investor meeting.

Then I met a firm who fell in love with it. That’s when you know you are onto something.

Getting funding is really a process of continual and incremental improvements on your concept and therefore your product. I can assure you almost every company that has been funded has gone through this process.

For Roboinvest, we are now part-way through the funding process and everyone we speak to is interested in our product.

Hopefully within the next month or so we will have completed this process and can get on with taking our product to an official launch later this year.

Key takeaways:

• Raising capital is distracting, time-consuming and difficult but also rewarding.
• Don’t focus your efforts on only a few investors, cast the net far and wide.
• Ensure you process every piece of feedback and continually evolve your pitch and investor documents.
• Investors want to see the same things – usage and proof of concept (which are kind of the same thing since proof comes with a certain level of usage), or more often called traction and social proof.
• You will get many people saying “no” but don’t get discouraged and keep evolving.