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Hear This Pitch

Open Sourcing The Fundraising Process

Publictivity Pitch- Version OneMarch 15 2008

Tips When Making Your PitchMarch 15 2008

I think there really is an art to a great pitch. It’s not something that comes overnight. I’m probably most excited to see the progression of our pitch from its first iteration (which will be posted up shortly) all the way to its final iteration that is used to close our round of funding. Hopefully that’s sooner than later. Keep in mind Fundraising is a whole lot more than “hearing a pitch”. I’ve put together a good list of advice, resources, thoughts,etc. that I have on the entire pitching process. This isn’t a “what to include in your slides”. There’s enough resources on that. I’ll most likely be updating this throughout the life of the project with things you contribute you via your comments and more resources I find.

Solve a Problem… Off The Bat- Business are all about solving problems that people have. Investors are pitched numerous times a day, let alone a week. You need to get the value proposition in their head even sooner than a prospective customer.

Don’t Clutter Slides- Many people often pitch with cluttered and irrelevant slides. You know what I’m talking about, the guys who fit in so much information that they have to start making the font size smaller. You know what that causes? Blackberry usage by the VCs. I

Welcome And Why We’re Doing ThisMarch 15 2008

Welcome everyone to the first post of HearThisPitch, an experiment in open sourcing the fundraising process. If this is the first post you’re reading, you’re probably thinking: this is absolutely nuts. You’re right… it is. But that’s what it takes in the world, someone to do something that is just absolutely nuts. As a company that’s just starting the fundraising process we saw two real reasons why we needed to do this:

To Benefit Other Entrepreneurs- Everyone hear’s about the fundraising process and always reads tons of blogs on it. You can read about it in the past tense until your heart is blue. You can even master it in graduate school in some cases. The real truth is, it’s all about real world scenarios and examples. We figured that we’re going to be learning a lot, and gaining a lot of insight into the process as entrepreneurs. As a company based upon open source technology and (eventually) an open source company ourselves, we figured we would open source the fundraising process. So what does that mean? It means we’re going to give you insight into what we’re thinking, our actual pitch decks (including notes + source files), feedback we gain, tips we learn and more.
To Benefit From Your Feedback- Tear us apart. that’s right, we fully expect most criticism to be tell us that we’re doing something wrong. That’s exactly what we want. We want you to tell us what we’r