6-mistakes-scaled

Six mistakes you’re making when writing your investment pitch

Once you’ve created all the content for your pitch, you are probably ready to sit back and admire your hard work. Sorry to break it to you, but you’re not done yet. Once you’ve picked out all the tastiest morsels of content that demonstrate how fantastic this opportunity is for investors, you need to go…

raising capital with a pitch deck

Can you raise capital with just a pitch deck?

There are so many ideas out there, so how do investors judge if yours is the next rocket to take off? What happens when you send a pitch deck to investors You just sent an investor pitch deck over email, LinkedIn, or somewhere else. Great! You feel a bit of anxiety over it and how…

Zooming our way to a virtual accelerator

Zooming our way to a virtual accelerator

As we embarked on this exciting journey last year to launch a very specialized 5G startup accelerator program here in Cologne/Bonn, Germany; little did we know that we will be hit by a pandemic which would dramatically impact all our planning and execution. COVID-19 changed the world for all of us in more than one way and we had…

Solving a problem

Is your business really solving a problem?

Young entrepreneurs often tend to imagine how great their product or service will be on the market and even bring change to people’s behavior. Often, they even fail to bring their product on the market. Many times, the problem begins with the same: The “problem” that the business tries solving. Advice #1: Don’t come up…

Pitch With Purpose

Pitch with Purpose: The five objectives you must meet in to win over investors

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your business idea is, without the perfect pitch it’s unlikely you’ll win investment. Your pitch is critical to getting you into a room with investors who are sufficiently intrigued to hear your full business plan. So, putting together the perfect pitch requires the right strategy and carefully crafted messaging that…

Creating a Pitchdeck for VCs

Creating a Pitchdeck for VCs

There are tons of articles out there talking about how to design a pitchdeck for investors. I want to share a structured way of creating your pitchdeck from the perspective of investors. One mistake I have seen many founders make is that they use one deck for sending to investors and also the same while…

Startuprad.io - Interview with Parul Madan (DueDash)

DueDash wants to help startups become investable

In this interview we talk to the investor and founder Parul Madan, who is the co-founder of the entrepreneur network DueDash. Parul can look back at more than 11 years as an employee in well-known companies (Ericson, Unitymedia (now part of Vodafone Germany)). The jobs brought her from India to Germany and the US. After some…

The founding team

The founding team: A startup’s foundation

A startup’s success depends on many factors, of which the idea itself is just a minor part. In the end, the idea is just the starting point from which great business may flourish. But then the question remains: What is it that makes businesses so successful? Investors bet on the jockey, not the horse If…

Dealing-with-investors-scaled

Dealing with Investors: what it’s really like

If you’ve attended one of my Fundraising Strategy Sessions, then you know I talk about your chances of raising investment. And you’ll also know I advocate an Expression of Interest form (EOI) as one of your five key pitch assets to support you in your fundraising journey. Here’s why: VC, Speedinvest, recently released data that…