In the early days of starting a business, besides polishing products, building teams, verifying business models and acquiring users, there is another particularly important thing, that is, financing. The following is my guide to venture financing, which is collected and arranged for you to read.
On the issue of financing, we should establish two important concepts:
1. Everything is done in advance, and it is abolished if it is not planned. If you want to get a good result in financing, you should be prepared.
2. Know yourself and yourself. A bosom friend means knowing yourself and yourself, knowing yourself and yourself. So that the two sides can match.
Where to invest in entrepreneurial financing is to guide entrepreneurs how to raise funds efficiently around these two core ideas.
This article is the first part of the theme, teaching entrepreneurs how to do a good job of preparation before financing.
In recent years, I have contacted a large number of entrepreneurs who are eager to get financing and deal with investors. They are not fully prepared before financing, and the result is often that they can't get positive feedback from investors.
In my opinion, the two most important preparations before financing are:
1. Make a BP (business plan) that can withstand scrutiny.
2. Prepare the financing speech.
BP is the first business card that the project shows to investors, and it is a stepping stone to find investors. The purpose is to make investors interested in you, and the latter things can only be achieved with interest. Writing a good BP is not only a respect for investors, but also an affirmation of the original intention of starting a business. Financing is indispensable for face-to-face communication or roadshows with investors. Therefore, in addition to having a BP that can withstand scrutiny, we must also prepare a good financing speech. The two are logically consistent, but one is written expression and the other is oral explanation.
Everyone is right? How to do a good job in BP and how to talk about projects? Often confused. In fact, both BP and pronunciation have methods to follow. As long as you follow the usual methods step by step and constantly correct and improve yourself, I believe the success rate of financing will be greatly improved, which is much better than your own exploration.
The first item of financing is to prepare a PPT with BP, 10- 15 pages that can stand scrutiny.
So what does a refined BP contain? In short, it is six modules:
1. Why do you want to make discovery? What's the problem? What is the demand?
2. Who will be the founder and who will make up the team?
3. What to do, how to do it and how to make money. What are the business model and profit model?
4. How are the competitors? Who are the main competitors? Where is the comparative advantage?
5. Operation Status and Future: Where are you now? What will happen in the future (short term/long term)?
6. How much money do you need, and where do you spend it to achieve your stage goal?
These six modules are what investors are most concerned about. To write BP, you only need to answer the above six questions. The answer to each question is no more than two pages PPT. A complete BP only needs 10 pages, and at most it does not exceed 15 pages. Irrelevant content can be deleted and complex content can be condensed. Get to the core and don't be covered up.
The above is a clear level. If you want to impress investors better, you need to understand investors' judgment on the project, that is, their investment logic. Try to be close to the logic of investors, so that the output content can be recognized by investors, that is, what they want to see, and you are very close to the success of financing.
Prepare a financing speech for the second financing.
Doing BP is a process of deep thinking. Once a good BP is presented, I believe you will think more clearly about the development logic of the project. On this basis, what you have to do is to prepare a financing speech, that is, to tell a good story. No matter what kind of investors you meet, you can express them smoothly from beginning to end, and what you say is very credible, feasible and touching.
When you go to see investors to show your business plan, you should know what they want most. In other words, which is the most important for investors? The answer is: people, that is, you. During the whole financing speech, let investors believe that you are the entrepreneur they are about to invest in, which will help them earn more returns.
In your short financing speech, you have to convey 10 important information.
The first and most important one is honesty. Investors want to bet on an honest entrepreneur, not someone who makes people suspect that he has ulterior motives or small moves.
The second important thing is enthusiasm. If you are not enthusiastic about your company, how can others be enthusiastic about it? After that, you need to continue to enrich the overall image you want to convey to investors. This is the third experience. Are you going to tell them? Have you ever started a business before, or worked in a big company, and have experience in related fields? . Investors like to invest in serial entrepreneurs. Because even if you don't succeed at the first time, you have learned from your failure, and these experiences will be very useful when starting a business for the second time.
The fourth is knowledge. You know a lot about the field of entrepreneurship, have a thorough understanding of the industry and the market, and have a broad vision. This is the factor that gives you extra points.
The fifth is skills, that is, the skills that a company should have, such as management ability, research and development ability, marketing ability and so on. You tell investors that you and your team have these abilities.
The sixth is leadership. You should be infectious and have management methods that can make people follow your leadership, inspire and motivate them to become part of your team.
Seventh, you should be resilient, and you will stick to it from the beginning after choosing to start a business. No company is smooth sailing, investors should know that you will stick to it until the end.
Eighth, you should have foresight. The person investors are looking for should be ambitious and have lofty ideals.
Ninth, you should face the reality. You should let investors know that you have considered all kinds of risks, problems and countermeasures, and you will put your ideas into practice step by step.
Finally, you should have the ability to listen to others. Investors are generally well-informed, they are very sensitive to business, and good investors have good insight into the company's operation and industry. Investors want their experience to be used by you.
You should convey this message quietly throughout your speech and regard your speech as a timeline. From the moment you give a speech, you should arouse investors' emotions, and almost all speeches should arouse people's emotions. Emotions can be strong or weak. According to the total * * * time, you should let your speech heat up rapidly, mobilize the investors' emotions higher and higher, and finally make them sit still and inspire them to give you money immediately.
If your speech level is poor, there are two ways:
First, don't rush to meet investors. First, exercise yourself by simulating roadshows in the company, make the project clear in the shortest time, pass on the most valuable information to others, and then go out to show your face when you feel satisfied.
Second, give full play to the strengths of others, select people who are good at talking from your partners and explain the project to investors.
Supplementary knowledge:
In all entrepreneurial projects, especially early projects, the founding team is the largest investor in the project. From this perspective, the business logic that entrepreneurs need to uphold should be consistent with the investment logic of external investors. Therefore, BP is not only written for investors, but also for themselves. A good BP can help you refine and sort out your entrepreneurial ideas, guide you to analyze the market and users, find good positioning and breakthrough points, clarify product logic and business direction, plan development paths, build teams, and customize capital planning; Success is not easy. Although there is passion, there is a lack of deep thinking. Write it down on paper, forcing you to check whether your operation idea is feasible. Help you correct unrealistic ideas and reduce the cost of trial and error. It can deepen your memory of the core, such as market competition and solutions.
Investors are an extremely busy group, and they have to open every day? Countless wills, see? Numerous BP's are operating important cases at hand and doing post-investment services, so you must consider their time. It takes time to stand out from VC's mountain of business plans and get financing. If a BP doesn't interest investors within 5 seconds, it will be thrown into the trash can. A thing that can't be explained clearly in five minutes is generally not a good project. So good BP and speech skills are indispensable and must be taken seriously.
How to add icing on the cake through data: 1) Team and data are often the initial judgments and points of interest. If there is soaring data, why not just show it off? Showing the data will help increase your confidence, improve the excitement of both sides and introduce a conversation angle. Why the data rose so well, further improving the conversation atmosphere. 2) Numbers are the most convincing, and investors like numbers and charts best. How many registered users are there? How many active users are there? How many PV does the website have? How many fans are there? What is the communication effect? If there is income, what is the income and profit, and is the average customer unit price reasonable? It is impossible for investors to try your product only through BP, so operational data becomes the most intuitive experience outside the product. 3) The operation data should be listed appropriately, and it is suggested to display the magnitude and data milestones. For example, the APP has been online for three months, the number of users is in the order of one million, and the daily life is in the order of one hundred thousand.
There are many things to do in starting a business, but we should not neglect the important things because we are busy. Financing is a matter related to the fate of startup companies, so we should take it seriously. As the founder /CEO of the company, we should develop the habit of regularly updating and perfecting BP, improve our communication and speech skills, and constantly revise and improve ourselves, so as to be useful in financing, recruiting partners, applying for special funds, and external public relations, and achieve twice the result with half the effort.
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