Clickerance Pre-seed Deck
Earlier this year, I read this First Round interview of Mathilde Collin and became so obsessed with all of her recommendations. I simply drafted it a guide for many of the things I now do as a founder, from scheduling everything (including 10mins daily Headspace meditation) to disciplined communication. I am not yet there in terms of compliance, but I reckon that her interview sits in one of my top 3 all-time productivity hacks.
I am continuing in that same spirit and would like to share the deck we used to raise our £300K pre-seed round at Clickerance. If this is the first time you are reading about Clickerance, I wrote about the mission of re-imagining grocery shopping for diet-diverse households. It’s 2021 and with so many mega fundraising rounds announced daily, I believe there is now an abundance of resources out there to help founding teams raise investments. Regardless, I hope that we can add some learnings from our experience to the wealth of knowledge already available, in a way that helps at least one other founding team.
Before the fundraise 💰
From accelerators to crowdfunding platforms, there is without doubt a ton of avenues now available to founders to raise capital that was much more difficult, a few years ago. And with competitive deal flows at later stage rounds, a lot more capital has moved further upstream to earlier stage ventures.
Before I joined Santiago on this journey, he had done a good job of mobilising a team of 3 Imperial college students to build out the proof of concept for the idea. As I reflect on our own fundraise, I at least like to believe that this action was in part a major reason for our success, as it quickly showed the potential of what we were trying to build. The other major factor is the access to angel investor relationships within the 1st and 2nd degree connections of the founding team. I think the last major factor is that we had some pedigree of getting both small and big things done. Of course there are other factors like SEIS/EIS incentive we were able to offer qualified investors, the personal story of the founders and connection to the problem (Santiago is corn intolerant and I was an immigrant, soon to be dad) and the market size of the opportunity.
Of course, these are plain guesses, as only our investors can give a true assessment of why they backed us. However I would wager that for each of our investors, at least one of the factors had a big influence on their decision.
The How 👋🏾
- We researched our network and built out a list of potential angel investors we know we could reach out to or at least be connected to through some 1st degree connections. Then used this tracker to monitor the progress in our pipeline, tracking them along the funnel. We applied to a ton of accelerators/incubators too (and did get our daily dose of rejections). Thankfully we did get past multiple interview stages to the final stage of Techstars Torino, and although it did end in another No, considering the acceptance rate of Techstars, making it to the final gave a good sense of validation.
- We hosted our pitch deck on Onepager and shared this link with quite a few investors. For some others, we simply attached the deck to the e-mails sent out, alongside the link. Onepager is a really good tool as it allows you see analytics not just on the deck but on many other things like time spent on videos, team profiles, FAQs, e.t.c.
- We tried to condense most of the Zoom call next-steps from our outreach into a window of 3-weeks. In reality, some did fall outside this condensed window, but this at least allowed us to show momentum in that window.
- We scripted a flow for all the talking points we wanted to cover during a meeting but kept it so flexible that we could literarily start at any point in that flow and still cover the entire flow. In addition, at the end of each call, we tried to either add a new question to our investor FAQs or refine an earlier answer. This is one of the interesting bits I enjoyed about the process; gaining insights from investors, even if they do pass on the opportunity, in a way that adds further clarity to your vision.
The Deck 🙂
Investors’ feedback on the deck (I totally borrowed this commentary style from Mathilde’s Series A, Series B and Series C publicly shared decks)
Slides that were really strong:
- Problem: Many investors quickly understood and related with the problem even if they didn’t necessarily have a personal connection with it.
- Why Now: This was one simple slide that had a great impact because it enabled us to demonstrate why the timing looked good to take on the problem.
Slides that were really weak :
- Market slide: Even though we did have a good explanation for the total addressable market, the slide did a poor job of explaining the actual potential of the opportunity.
- Competition: Again, like the market slide, while in the story telling, I would like to believe we did a good job explaining our unique differentiation, this slide was a bit confusing in that regard.
Slides that we could have added:
- Target user Personae: While we had spent quite a bit of time in understanding the who the ideal user of Clickerance might be, we didn’t show the insights we had gained in this regard on the deck, and often had to talk through it in a semi-structured way when asked during investor calls.
I hope you do find some of our learnings useful in your fundraising journey, and happy to learn from your experiences too.
