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If you are reading this, more likely you are looking for funding for your startup.

My experience is only with tech startups so I will focus on these for my 4 Ts rule to pitch and convince investors to come on board.

T1= Technology: How much your technology is better/superior to the competition? You want to make sure your solution is a strong evolution to the current status quo in your field but you don’t obviously want a revolution. Investors like a great improvement but don’t always like to invest in “pioneers”. Pioneers mean very long shot and high risk. But there are exceptions to the rule with T2 below.

T2= Time to market: How big is the market now for your product but more importantly how big it will be in the near future? Investors are more probably looking for exponential markets and burgeoning solutions for those markets. The trend towards sustainable, green solutions is becoming more and more dominant with investors. Creating large efficiencies or improving liveability (using IoT in combination with AI) applied to B2B enterprise markets (vs. consumer goods) is dominating the seed investments in 2019 and we could see this trend continuing in 2020 with the climate change “do good for the planet” investments. Y Combinator, one of the largest incubators in the world is on par with that trend.

T3= Team: OK, now that you have the right solution at the right time, investors are looking more closely at your company. Who are you? They need to be confident they are investing in a trustable team. So I highly recommend building a very relevant team with complementary skills. In the tech world, you would need, at a bare minimum, 2 founders: 1 with strong sales & marketing capabilities and 1 with a very solid tech background. Usually, a team of 4-5 is more reassuring, adding a financial guru (to speak the investors’ lingo), and a digital marketing specialist (as your company at this stage is unknown so will require that expertise to promote itself at the lowest cost), and possibly a tech expert in the specific field of your solution (backing up/supporting your primary tech champion to refine the solution).

T4= Traction: Do you already have customers or close prospects for your solution? and usually, the following question comes right after: What is your business model? The first 10 customers (I mean relevant customers) would be the hardest ones to get on board but also will determine your capabilities to attract (aka to invoice), and the current interest on the market for your solution. So you should highly focus on getting on board strong references from day 1. Now, about your business model: The subscription model is the most powerful to convince investors as you are not selling a product but a solution with recurring revenue. This means, the more customers you sign up, the more revenue will grow quickly and steadily (in principle if your churn rate is low).

So here are my 4 Ts in short. I tried to provide simple guidelines to make it easier to convince investors. If your idea/solution is not within those 4Ts, there might be ways to tweak it so that it is more attractive before you submit it to investors.

Last point: you usually only have 1 chance, so work on your pitch! You must be able to explain your solution to whoever within 1 sentence or 30 seconds.

My motto is: “translating the geek-speak into simple words and actions”.

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