Hello everyone. Today, we’re talking about the most common fundraising mistakes I see from more experienced entrepreneurs. When you have a lot of experience in startups it’s easy to forget the basic fundamentals, especially when you’re under pressure.
1. If you’re fundraising, it requires 100% of your focus. Lean on that great team you’ve built, so you can get the job done as quickly as possible. The hero mentality of trying to do everything doesn’t help anybody.
2. Create scarcity. Fear of missing out still influences investor behavior, even if you have a long history in startups. Create scarcity with low round targets, soft commits, and regular progress updates. Doing that boring grind work will help a lot.
3. Keep the deck simple. I know it’s tempting to ignore the template structure and start with an in-depth look over your decades long career or a 3k word deep dive on your tech but you still have to focus on getting the investor interested with a simple message at first, then letting their questions guide how deep we go on certain topics.
