There is a recurrent question coming to me for really early stage startup, who haven’t incorporated: how do we get investors without giving the majority of shares in my startup from day one? For people who already have gone through the process, or for experienced people, that seems easy and obvious (so you can skip it!). But it’s not. Rather than repeating again and again, I’d try here to explain how to deal with it. If you incorporate your company as a SA/AG/Ltd with CHF 100’000.- (sorry for readers outside of Switzerland – but the mechanism is universal) and you only have CHF 50’000.- in your pocket, you need the remaining amount of cash (for simplicity, let’s avoid the fact that you could indeed incorporate with this amount. Or that you can bring real goods). If someone invests 50k now …
HOW TO Make The Perfect Pitch (Part II/III): the 10 (+1) slides you need
This is the second post of the serie “How to make a perfect pitch”. If you’ve missed the first part last week, here it is. This week, we’ll discuss more about the Pitch structure. As you already know, you just have limited time to make the investor enthousiastic on you or your project. On average:, you just have 5-7 minutes to present your project. That’s quick so you’d rather be effective and not wasting any pitching opportunity. The first 30 seconds are crucial, as it will determine if your audience will really listen to you (or just reading their emails or play on their smartphone instead). You’ve probably already heard about Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30-rule, which is now really common: 10 slides 20 minutes (5-7 minutes presentation, 13-15 minutes Q/A) 30 minimal font size I’d like to share with you how …
HOW TO Make The Perfect Pitch (Part I/III)
Four years ago, I’ve dived into the startup world and I’ve seen a few hundreds (or more?) startup pitches since then, from early stage to mature companies. With this experience and a great presentation from the amazing Jean-Pierre Vuilleumier (who I’d like to thank for his energy at helping Swiss startups and what he taught me) in mind, I thought that some tips on how to pitch your startup could be helpful. I’ve also recently observed that the need for pitch coaching/training is really present, for first time entrepreneurs as well as for more experienced ones. I do not pretend to reinvent the art of pitching, but sincerely hope that it will help you make a greater impact… To make it digestible, I’ve decided to split the content in a blog serie that will be published on Mondays. Don’t forget …
DeinDeal.ch Launches an e-Commerce Incubator
Adrian Locher, one of the 3 co-founders of the Swiss daily deal platform DeinDeal.ch, presented his company and announced a new incubation program during Swiss Startup Camp 2012 Saturday in Basel. Before explaining the program, let’s take a moment to learn a little about DeinDeal.ch’s journey. In January 2010, he and his co-founders were observing Groupon’s success (started just around 15 months ago in the US) and noticed that nobody was doing something similar in Switzerland. A Business Plan written, a 18m2 office rented, 2 employees hired, an investment of CHF 25’000.- and the first version of DeinDeal was launched mid-March 2010. The startup sold 95 coupons during the first 24 hours… number of coupons that are now sold in just 3 minutes (!), which is representative of the fast and amazing growth DeinDeal experienced during its 24 months of …