You’ve run through your deck a hundred times. You’ve practiced pitching to your cat.

He declined to invest.

Startup founders work incredibly hard to pitch their dream to investors and get funded.

As an angel investor, I see a lot of presentations. So, I thought I’d share the 3 biggest mistakes I see founders making:

1) Not clearly explaining what the startup does. If I don’t understand what your startup does and why within the first minute, you lost me.

Investors are people too, and struggle with attention, especially given the number of presentations they see. A demo day I attended last week had 17 companies presenting.

Don’t lose your audience! Clearly state exactly what you do and what problem you’re solving, ideally within the first 30 seconds.

Being able to clearly and concisely say what you do also helps you attract customers and key employees.

2) Not showing a growth trend.

Don’t make us guess! If you’ve got a strong growth trend in revenue or users, put that graph on the screen.

But don’t rely on our ability to read a graph that pops up for 20 seconds on a slide. Do the math for us.

If you went from $2,000 in revenue in August to $5,000 in November, use a tool like this to find your compounded monthly growth rate. In this case, it would be 36%, which is outstanding.

I saw a founder do this well at a demo day this fall. 6 weeks later, she raised a $3.5 million seed round.

This stuff works!

3) Not taking questions. If at all possible, you want to take questions from your audience.

Even short presentations can allow for this. Some demo days might provide just 7 minutes per startup. But you can present for 3 minutes and take questions for 4.

Every investor has objections you have to overcome before they invest. Give them a chance to overcome those objections by taking their questions.

Answer clearly and concisely. You should be taking about the same amount of time to answer the question as they took to ask it, no more.

I hope this helps! Fundraising can be exhausting and nervewracking, but if you follow a few simple guidelines, you can succeed.

Best of luck!

What have your biggest challenges been in pitching investors? Let me know in the comments at the bottom.

More on tech:

An Investor’s Dream Cold E-mail

The Biggest Challenges for Startups Now

Why I Just Invested in Kippo, Where Gamers Find Love

Photo: “Wrong Way Signs” by Arizona Department of Transportation is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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