Profiling Questionnaire and Pitching Instructions
Thursday, January 14, 2010 2 comments
My writing, today, is largely about technology/online entrepreneurs and ties in with the 1M/1M project. The aim of all this is to inspire, educate, and connect entrepreneurs through case studies, interviews, profiles, and so on that present a thorough and comprehensive view into the world of entrepreneurship.
If you are an experienced entrepreneur, we try to capture the strategies, issues, and anecdotes of your success to help less experienced entrepreneurs learn from you through our Entrepreneur Journeys series. For 1M/1M premium lounge members who are working on a project and have achieved reasonable levels of validation, we often profile you on our 1M/1M Incubation Radar series, which we then expose to investors, sometimes also to potential customers. In Deal Radar, we celebrate entrepreneurs who have reached $1 million in revenue, and this also exposes entrepreneurs to investors and customers. In addition, I often make acquisition recommendations to larger companies, and companies featured elsewhere on the blog show up in these recommendations in the Technology Stocks series.
Here is a media story on how one of our 1M/1M companies has received interest from five investors. The company was profiled in IR.
Below are comprehensive pitching instructions for working with me and my team.
Questions for Deal Radar and The 1M/1M Incubation Radar:
1. Give a brief summary of the company, your product, and what your product does.
2. CEO’s personal background. Where did (s)he get the idea for the current venture? What is his/her domain experience in the segment?
3. Any particular reason that led up to this venture? Other founders worth mentioning?
4. What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? Competition? Competitive positioning? Tell us about your market’s dynamics and why you stand a chance of making something innovative happen. Please be sure to name specific competitors; we cannot publish without this.
5. Describe the value proposition, including differentiation from the rest of the market.
6. How big is the market? How do you calculate total addressable market (TAM)? What is the business model? Be as specific as possible. I prefer bottom-up TAM versus top-down TAM for my analysis and dislike broad swathes.
7. What are the top target segments? Be precise and granular.
8. How did you penetrate the market and get early traction? In other words, what was your beachhead?
9. What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Please provide some appropriate numbers we can include. [Note: We need to publish revenue numbers and will not entertain deals that refuse to share these numbers. You can provide a range that is reasonable, not $10 million–$100 million, which isn't reasonable.]
10. Some detailed information on traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track and are willing to share? We need some anchor statistics to do a Deal Radar post. If you are unwilling to share any metrics, then we would have to decline any coverage. We also need validation points like customer names/sizes, if you are selling to the enterprise, or are involved in OEM business models.
11. What is your pricing model, and how much does your product cost? If pricing is determined separately for each customer, please give an average range.
12. How did you finance the different phases of the company? Seed? Angel? VC? Corporate? Please list each round individually with dates, investors and amounts for each round. I love bootstrapping businesses, by the way. If you have been doing so, feel free to describe stories of your bloody battles. And if you have used nifty financing strategies like receivables financing or factoring, do share.
13. What financing stage are you at right now? Will you be raising more money? When? Who is your ideal investor? (And yes, we consider non-equity investors as well.)
14. Describe some of your team-building experiences. Is your management team complete now? What is special about your management team? Human and anecdotal stories give us maximum ammunition to bring you alive in our coverage.
15. What is your growth strategy?
16. What are your thoughts about exit? Please don’t provide canned answers; it turns me off. And also, you don’t have to have an exit strategy. I am very supportive of businesses that like to build cash flow and offer healthy dividends to their owners/investors.
If your company is greater than $1 million in revenue, then we will profile you in Deal Radar 2010. Please fill up the questionnaire above, and email Melanie Blake [melanieb50 AT gmail.com] with a completed questionnaire.
If your company is less than $1 million in revenue, you have two opportunities: Every week, I host an online strategy roundtable for entrepreneurs, at which you are most welcome to pitch. This is part of our 1M/1M initiative aimed to help a million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue. Members of the 1M/1M premium lounge have the opportunity to be profiled on The 1M/1M Incubation Radar; this series is open only to members. You need to have validated customer feedback to qualify for Incubation Radar. To pitch at a roundtable, use this link.
Besides DR, I write Entrepreneur Journeys (companies with >$10 million in revenue only) and Tech Stocks (coverage of public company strategy).
Great !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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