The Art of Pitching
The Art of Pitching!!
Before you even do the pitch and before you even ask for money, let's take a couple steps back. Relationship building. I always say start raising money when you don't actually need money. Generating FOMO, generating trust, and demonstrating integrity and responsibility, are the things you need to optimize for.
The way that you can do that is you need somebody when you're not actively fundraising - you don't need them to make a decision immediately. You have 6, 12, 24 months before you need to close on something. Come adding value - you want to have that first meeting? Reach out to them cold on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, however, you get in contact initially.
You don't actually have to use Warmly at all. When I started Ingressive, I had no connections. As you guys know, my mom - 23 years of active duty in the U. S. military, my dad - a pastor in Nigeria. We had no business connections. I started each one of my relationships from zero. Either reaching out to people via LinkedIn or Twitter, or literally going door to door. Literally. going door to door.
So when you start out, go adding value. One, pique someone's curiosity. “Hey, I know you're really interested in x, y, and z. Here are my findings and research on this space.” Or, “I'm in this industry and I'd love to brainstorm with you on x, y, and z.” Specific things that they can say, oh, interesting, I'd love to learn more.
So that can be a little tricky if you have no track record and it's absolutely cold and they can't google you or research you. Because it has to be such a catchy, engaging email, your odds of getting a response are slightly lower. How to increase the likelihood of you getting a response, you don't have to have the best email, the best, most amazing, catchy email ever. Start generating content online. Show that you are a sector expert, a subject matter expert. That can be tweet threads. Doesn't have to be long and dramatic. Just regularly be tweeting about the areas that you know best and the spaces that most interest you. So when someone Googles you, you say, “Hey, I'd love to talk to you about the agriculture sector in Nigeria or UX UI design for early-stage tech founders across Africa.”
And then you leave a link to an area where you make a lot of comments on a space. That's a really, really easy way to build trust. Such that when you send an email, it's validated and someone will have your time. So the art of initially cold reaching out, that's one.
Two, you have the meeting and you listen to the advice. So assuming that you're meeting with somebody from whom you'd like advice or from whom you would like investment. Listen to what they're saying, be honest and authentic. Sometimes you think that, “Oh, I'm, I have this meeting with this investor. I have to tell them all these crazy, amazing things. I have to embellish and make myself sound much bigger and not touch on the problems and say, I have no competitors.” No, tell the truth, because every interaction that you have is a data point for the other person. You say, “I have no competitors.” That tells me you haven't done your research. “We're going to become profitable in six months and we'll never have to raise again, we only need 100, 000 to do so.” That person probably hasn't built out their financial model and their economics don't make sense. I'm not sure that I trust in their ability to project appropriately the money that they need for their business. Make sure to be practical, grounded, authentic, and telling the truth about the numbers.
You can have a positive perspective on the outcome, but make sure you're clearly talking about all the things that could go right as well as all the things that could go wrong. And then the most important part, demonstrating integrity and responsibility. Follow up on the thing you said you were going to do before the timeline expires of when you said you were going to do it.
I promise you, if you are remote and you don't have direct time to interact with a person, ways to build trust and ways for an investor to learn that they can trust you and that you're responsible, is for you to do consistently the things you say you're going to do before the deadline expires to do it.
I hope that is helpful. If you'd like to learn more, if you'd like to work directly with me and the rest of the Ingressive Capital team, please go to here and apply for funding now. Thanks.