VC Minute – quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better.
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How do you generate your Aha Moment? With practice and iteration.
Harry Stebbings said it best in a 20 Minute VC episode that he posted on February 13th, I’ll link to the episode and the timestamp in the show notes. He said that the best fundraisers are comedians. Comedians are constantly testing their material with their audiences to see what works, to see what resonates and what doesn’t.
This is how you generate your Aha Moment. Pay attention to the questions you’re getting; when you’re getting the questions. When someone is leaning in, versus when someone is leaning back and checking their phone.
Our friends Kate and Jessica at the fantastic pre-seed fund Hannah Gray, shared how they did this during their pitches. As they were raising their fund, they would both be on every LP pitch. When one was talking, the other one was paying attention to what the audience’s reaction was.
They will compare notes afterwards and then make adjustments. And by the end, they had their pitch so dialed in they doubled the size of their fund. Granted, they are amazing investors in their own right, but it goes to show that even investors with incredible track records are working on their pitch every single time.
Every aspect of your story is up for adjustment: how you talk about yourself, your team, the problem solution market, all of it.
Think of it as applying the lean startup methodology for your pitch. Build. Measure. Learn. Build your pitch. Measure the results on your audience. Learn from those results. Adapt and start the process over again.
Work with your co-founder during pitch calls, especially on that first call, to understand what’s resonating. Take it back and workshop it until you’ve got it dialed in and are generating Aha Moments more often than you’re not.
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