Founders might have to do 50 meetings to get a check. But you can make those meetings 10X better and up your odds of raising money by changing how you answer investor questions.
Picture Francis sitting on Zoom. I have a list of 8 questions I want to ask the founder in my trusty composition book.
But we’re 18 minutes into a 30 minute call, and I haven’t had a chance to ask any of them yet!
The founder has been excitedly telling me about his company. And I’m starting to get excited about it too!
But the downside of that excitement is the presentation can lose focus.
Structure Your Meeting Like This
Here’s a great way to structure meetings: the 1/3 and 2/3 rule.
Present for the first 1/3 of the meeting. Leave the remaining 2/3rds for Q&A.
If the investor says they’ve already reviewed the deck and would just like to do Q&A, it’s fine to skip to that too!
How to Answer Questions
If you do these 2 things, you will answer questions 10X better than most founders:
1) Be as specific as possible.
2) Take about as long to answer a question as the investor took to ask it.
Let me give you a concrete example of a founder who does this really well.
Peter from Props was on a recent episode of This Week in Startups, and he presents and answers questions beautifully. Even Jason commented on it.
Do you see how crisp his answers are? Aim for that.
What to Avoid
When you answer questions, you want to avoid nonspecific or meandering responses. Here’s a (fictional) example of what you don’t want to do:
“Me: How many paying customers do you have?
Founder: Well, we started out with some pilots and we’re working closely with Bigcorp right now. We have a letter of intent from them and our internal champion, Melissa, is super stoked on the product! She’s telling everyone internally about it, and the deal could come any day. We’re also heading to a conference in Vegas next week which should be really helpful. My COO can’t make it but I’ll be there, we even got a booth.”
You see what happened there? We took up a bunch of time, and I never got an answer to my question.
I can only assume they have no paying customers. And I also have less time to find out more about the company.
Wrap-Up
Crisp, focused presentation. Crisp Q&A with specific answers.
That’s what you want to aim for.
Even if the facts aren’t as impressive as you’d like, investors will respect your candor! And hey, just because you don’t have any revenue right now doesn’t mean you won’t next month!
By showing that you know how to sell and you’re candid, your stock goes up in the investor’s mind. Use this approach, and those checks will start rolling in.
What have your investor meetings been like? Leave a comment and let us know!
Have a great weekend, everybody! Let’s relax, have some fun, and recharge our batteries to do awesome work next week.
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