How to close angel investors

Last week I spoke at the LAUNCH Festival Sydney in Australia. Huge thanks to the entire LAUNCH team for bringing me down and for their fantastic event / hospitality; it was an awesome experience and I had a great time!

Photo courtesy of someone on Twitter – apologies, I didn’t write down who took this — thank you! (Email me and will credit you)

Most of my posts are about raising money from Silicon Valley VCs. But, the world is filled with all kinds of investors. And most businesses are not backable by most Silicon Valley VCs because:

• They are not software-enabled ideas
• They are not deemed to be in a large enough market for a VC to invest
• The founders don’t want to build a “Go big or go home” business
• Etc…

But these are not bad things. There are going to be plenty of big winners in say e-commerce / direct-to-consumer products that VCs will not back. Or in real estate. Or all kinds of other things. And it isn’t a bad thing if a founder wants to build a business that gets to say $10m per year and sells for $40m. That’s a fantastic outcome for founders. But, most VCs will not back any of these things.

So who do you pitch for money?

The good news is that the world is filled with money. It may not seem like it, but it really is. Your job as an entrepreneur is to find it and unlock it. So, I wanted to share some new material I created for the LAUNCH event on how to find angel and close investors. Here are my slides:

The overall takeaway from these slides is:

• There are lots of rich people worldwide — they don’t even have to be super rich. There are lots of angels who can write you a $1k-$10k check.
• Angels may not know they are angels. It’s your job to plant the seed in their heads that you are open to an investment from them!
• Angels are motivated by many different things; figure out how to tie your story to something that they want; getting an investment – much like sales – is about solving for their needs not yours
• It’s a numbers game — pitch many many people and don’t give up

Go out and pitch your eye doctor!