What investors check before a first meeting
Most first meetings are decided before they happen. What an investor checks in the ten minutes before they agree to meet, and how to answer it on the page.
Most first meetings are decided before they happen. Someone at the fund, often an associate, has spent ten minutes with the deck, the website and a search engine. What they look for in that time is predictable, and almost all of it can be answered on the page before anyone asks.
Whether you are in their remit
The first check is mechanical: stage, sector, geography and the size of the cheque. A deck that leaves the amount and the stage until the last slide makes this harder than it needs to be. State the raise, the stage and the use of funds early, in one place.
Why now
Investors want to know what has changed: in the market, in regulation, in cost or in how customers behave, that makes this company possible today and not five years ago. If the answer is only that the founders are ready, the case is weaker than it looks.
Why this team
Not a list of past employers, but the reason this team is better placed than anyone else to win: the experience, the access, or the insight that others in the market don’t have.
The evidence, for the stage
Evidence is judged against the stage. At pre-seed it might be a pilot, letters of intent or a waiting list. At Series A it is revenue and how it grows. What hurts is a gap between the claim and the proof: a large market slide followed by nothing that shows anyone in it is buying.
Numbers that hold together
The ask, the use of funds, the runway it buys and the milestone it reaches should connect. That milestone is what makes the next round possible, so name it. Market sizing built up from real customers and real prices is more convincing than a share of a large published figure.
The tax position
For UK angel investors, whether the company qualifies for SEIS or EIS relief often decides whether the conversation goes further. Say plainly whether you have advance assurance from HMRC, have applied for it, or don’t qualify.
Consistency
Before a meeting, investors check the website, the founders’ LinkedIn profiles and the Companies House filings. If each says something slightly different about what the company does, it raises a question that the deck then has to answer. The same story everywhere is a quiet signal that the company knows what it is.
What this means for preparation
Each of these can be answered on the page. The work is deciding the answers before writing the slides, then checking every place an investor will look says the same thing. Writing the answers down is investor narrative work; the slides follow from it. That is what our investor-readiness review does: it reads your materials the way an investor will, before you send them.
Strategic Studios. Questions about this piece: stu@strategicstudios.co.uk