So I pitched to a VC today, and I got a same-day response after sending over the deck.
We usually invest at Series A and often write cheques of $2-3mil for a start.
Perhaps we can continue to monitor your progress?
If I was any younger, I might have been bothered. But this time, the goal was to get rejected ten times. This is rejection number one.
Do not get me wrong, though. I did not set myself out for failure. Instead, I figured that I needed ten pitches to tighten up my pitch. And this is what I did.
Iteration is the name of the game
Rejections are the best feedback you can get. Sometimes, like in the email above, they do not tell you why. Instead, the onus is on me, the CEO, to introspect on
- the unconvincing things I had said in the meeting, that made myself uncomfortable saying them
- the questions that were asked which caught me off guard
So, the first thing I did right after I got back to the office was to jot down what transpired. This is what I wrote:
Reflections from my pitch today
- How will you make money? (is not clear)
- Who are your customers
- Better transitioning from LandX -> Sapiengraph
- Require a clear value proposition
- What we do and why people need us is not very clear
- What market does Sapiengraph sit in?
- Frequency that our customer will use us? (Again, a clear value proposition for our customers)
Then I followed it up by dispatching an urgent request to the design team to update the deck so my next pitch will be smooth(er).
I am a staunch believer of iterating to greatness
Admittedly, I am not a native extrovert, nor a natural leader with the glib for persuasion. So I came into the fund-raising process jittery and unsure. But I trust the process of iterative learning -- to get into the thick of the tasks regardless of how bad and uncertain I am with the sole objective of succeeding. And more often or not, I will succeed. Onwards to my next pitch.