Lots of nice tactics in this, but a key assumption of the article: you have the knowledge of your market and the product that demonstrates your knowledge of the market so that you have a sense of confidence in your pitch and in your company's future.
The above probably sounds silly... until you've been in or seen pitches in which the folks pitching it don't have that confidence. The classic trap is building the pitch on good ideas and being smart about them. You can just about smell that pitch and it doesn't smell nice. Great pitches are ones where the audience starts thinking about how to accelerate a great product/market (introductions, additional markets, tactics, etc), not about how to validate it (search for comps, call around to colleagues, etc).
But YouTube wasn't making any $$$ when they got acquired! Those kids definitely had it: obviously growing and inevitable market in which they had huge adoption, huge growth, dominance. Questions after the pitch: How much do you need to crank this thing up? What kinds of introductions can we make? When would you like to start discussing acquirers? And, most importantly, where do we sign?
That is usually best. Some people you can also just reach out to directly, e.g. on Quora. Or you can go to an event and talk to e.g. a panelist, and then follow up afterwards.
Great overview post. A really useful, related post might be what goes into a VC pitch and examples of great ones and some not so great ones (just as a reference).
That is a pretty different dynamic and more similar to an angel round, given all the competition from angels for the same investment. The key is, once you get to Series A, the universe of potential financiers collapses down to the venture community.
Hey Elad, thanks for all the advice. Can you write the same post, but geared for someone at the stage just before that? i.e. going from $0 to seed round.
The above probably sounds silly... until you've been in or seen pitches in which the folks pitching it don't have that confidence. The classic trap is building the pitch on good ideas and being smart about them. You can just about smell that pitch and it doesn't smell nice. Great pitches are ones where the audience starts thinking about how to accelerate a great product/market (introductions, additional markets, tactics, etc), not about how to validate it (search for comps, call around to colleagues, etc).
But YouTube wasn't making any $$$ when they got acquired! Those kids definitely had it: obviously growing and inevitable market in which they had huge adoption, huge growth, dominance. Questions after the pitch: How much do you need to crank this thing up? What kinds of introductions can we make? When would you like to start discussing acquirers? And, most importantly, where do we sign?