Venture capital is the hardest kind of funding for startups to get; so, fittingly, it’s not something you can do without some serious planning. If you want to get the most coveted kind of startup funding there is, you’re going to want to make sure that you keep the following important things that the firm will look for in mind.

Genuine, Infectious Confidence

The most important thing to understand about getting venture capital funding in the early stage of the process is to have certainty. There is perhaps no greater factor in inspiring confidence in others than having genuine confidence yourself.

Genuine confidence means that your conviction can’t be faked. You can’t just have a slightly good feeling about how valid your claims about the business are; you need to have faith that your business will last a lifetime.

If you have even a single bit of doubt that your startup is worthy of receiving funding from, then that is indicative of a problem. Anybody who has to legitimately wonder whether or not their startup is worthy of investing in probably isn’t ready to receive it.

When it comes to the way that these firms appraise emerging businesses, the stakes are far too high for everyone involved for decisions to be made halfheartedly. Either you have maximum confidence in the potential for your business to grow, or you don’t.

If you can’t find it within yourself to fully invest confidence in your business, then it may be a wise decision to either go back to the drawing board or reassess the reasons that you believe the firm’s funding be well-placed in your idea.

Proof Of Potential

After confidence comes credibility. Instead of just projecting ideas about what you’d like to get done in the future, you’ve also got to be able to demonstrate a positive track record of success.

A track record of success doesn’t mean that you have to have already made a million dollars, but it does mean that you have to have at least one or two substantial things demonstrating your ability to replicate real results. Whatever your pitch may be, make sure that you have something that shows them that their confidence in you is based on something that is already visible in the present.

The proven ability of your business idea to be scaled up at an extremely fast rate is what will determine whether or not investors see your idea as something that needs to be given fuel. If your business is something that can only be qualified once is already in action, and that hasn’t happened yet, then the firms simply won’t bite.

A Personalized Approach

You have to make sure that your pitch is personalized, not mass-produced. Investors are still human beings, and naturally, they’re not going to appreciate being sent something that looks like spam mail. If whatever you send them looks like it could’ve easily been sent to 12 other people, they’re not going to spend any time looking through it.

Just about every naive startup founder believes that they can take a shotgun approach to finding funding, and just about all of them wind up disappointed.

A Founder Who Has Done Their Homework

Your research on the firm has to be more than thorough. If anything, aim to know more about the firm than what you think is necessary. Every different firm has different qualities that determine the likelihood of whether or not they’re going to see your idea as something of merit.

It definitely helps to look at firms that have a pattern of investing in business plans that are similar to yours; by doing that, you’ve already got a form of indirect social proof based on the success of their prior good investments.

Study up all of the different notable personalities in the firm as well, because knowing exactly who you’re talking to is going to count for a lot when it comes to the face-to-face meetings that you may have. Every single resource that you have to learn about about the firm should be treated as though it’s made of pure gold, so take as much time as necessary as it is to do recon in this area.

A Short And Sweet Summary

Last but not least, find a way to summarize what it is that your startup is about in a way that is both powerful and concise. You should be able to deliver the full value of your startup in something that’s as short as a slogan at the end of a radio commercial.

A lot of people think that a long pitch is the hardest thing to put together when it comes to displaying a startup’s value, but in reality, the greatest challenge comes from keeping things short. Find a way that you can nail down all of the key points that make your startup worth it in an elevator pitch that should last no more than 60 seconds at most. If you can have your idea make an impact with a single sentence, you are ready to show it to venture capital firms.

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