At the end of each pitch we were bombarded with questions from investors, and for many of them we didn’t have compelling answers.
However, each time we got a tough question from an investor we would incorporate the question back into our pitch deck.
In fact, we ended up revising our pitch deck more than 100 times. We went from a five page pitch deck which took 10 minutes to present, to a 25 page pitch which took 40 minutes.
By the end, investors had very few questions as we had given solid answers to all their questions before we even got to the end of our deck.
In the early days, our pitch deck was more of a utility, following a standard pitch structure: the vision, the problem, our solution, the size of our market, the strength of our team and so on.
However, when we described our product and vision to people without our pitch deck, we were able to successfully communicate our passion, the innovation of our product and our team’s excitement and competence.
Whenever we were pitching an investor with our actual slide deck, it felt like we were selling a generic product. We lost the excitement and communicated our product vision poorly.
After a while we were able to capture the vision, the excitement and the problems into a cohesive story and were able to capture this story in our pitch deck.
A mentor told us it was important to capture the emotion of the story; not just what you say, but also how you say it. Inevitably, investors all want to know the same things.
They’ll ask: ‘How big is the opportunity? How talented is the team? Why are you the right people to solve this problem?’
Making sure we satisfied their questions was so important, and this is something you can only improve with practice and continuous revision.
When we first started pitching to investors, we would pull out our pitch deck as soon as we got into a meeting.
We soon realised this was quite a naive approach. It is so important to build rapport and credibility before you start talking through your pitch.
Start building relationships with investors as early on as possible. Communicate your goals and your wins as you go.
It’s your job to convince people to work with you, to invest in your company. Most potential investors will want to spend time getting to know you and the way you work prior to committing.
We met Bill Tai, who introduced us to many of our other investors, more than two years ago. Yet we only recently closed our round.
Raising money takes a long, long time. My first trip to San Francisco was only supposed to be for a two week holiday. I’d planned two meetings; one with Bill Tai and the other with Facebook’s Lars Rasmussen.
I very quickly realised I needed to spend more time on the ground getting to know the technology scene and building my network.
My two week holiday ended up turning into a three month trip. I barely slept, and when I did it was on my brother’s apartment floor. I went to an event every single night of the week, trying to meet engineers and find people who could give me an open door to the start-up scene.
During this time, we met and spoke with many other investors who we kept in the loop with our efforts.
If you’re raising money, you need to build strong relationships with potential investors and advisors. We did this by communicating with them regularly.
We never could have predicted the adventures we’d have or the people we’d meet along the way. We’re lucky to now have the team in place, our product ready to launch and a burning passion for what we’re doing. And so the next chapter begins.
Melanie Perkins is co-founder of Canva, along with Cliff Obrecht. The Sydney-based business provides an online collaborative design platform, allowing users to create professional quality designs regardless of their skill set.
