Step 3: How to Prepare the Documents You'll Need

hey there my name is Kelly Nyland I am the founder and CEO at Whym a software company and I am doing a fundraising series for Founders so in our last step we talked about setting up your process in Trello or a project management tool and then getting those investors into a spreadsheet so that you can tap your network and start to get your introductions um flowing in So today we're going to talk about um a few more materials that you're going to need um and so this is going to be about assembling your materials and I wanted to share some of the tools that I

use to create these materials so company overview I think this is somewhat optional but as you get further along in your fundraising cycle so closer maybe to your price seed it's really helpful for the analysts um or the folks that are helping the Investment Partners at the Venture Capital firms to do diligence on you by giving them some more contextual information around your company versus just your send ahead deck or your send ahead deck expanded with your appendex I think a lot of investors might argue that you know you need just your send ahead and a great pitch but I have found that as the

conversations start to mature and the invest investors start showing interest it's really good to have a company overview in your pocket um to help visually lay out a lot of the materials that investors are going to want to see so if you're in your earlier stage you'll need some some very simple things which is more of your deck your financial um model and you know whatever else the investors kind of ask for during the diligence but as you could along I think that these materials be super helpful for you so just to do a quick overview VI so I use canva um for my decks

and my um overviews you can see here uh I'll zoom in a little bit um if I can here on the screen so um I do a company company overview which is just the one pager share my founding team these are all my uh current investors so I like to show my investors that they're in Good Company um along with my advisers which are in this section um and then I just kind of start telling them my story so this is uh this is an older version of our company overview but you can see we kind of start with a main image here our vision

um and then we kind of get into the problem we're solving our progress to date which really starts to lay out the market and the industry that we are participating in and paint that big broad picture of you know how we're going to become a billion dollar company which is the only type of company that Venture Capital can't afford to invest in so if that doesn't make sense I'll do a separate series on uh just getting Venture funding and there's some great information out there already on blog posts and U the YC uh blog as well so once I sort of share progress today try

to boil the financial information that I'm going to share in a spreadsheet down into some visual um pages with a little bit of context um then I share my ideal customer profile our traction to dat you know with uh whoever partners that we're working with um and then a one pager on the products so I do a little one pager on the product um and then a future features uh page on the product and kind of put together you know more of what would be consider a goto Market explanation of how that uh product would be received in the market and then a little bit

of information on the unique Market opportunity this is where you could speak to your differentiation as it pertains to competition or sort of where you fit within the industry and that's pretty much it so it's a lot of the things that you'll have in your data room but just visualized and canva has a lot of amazing templates that you can just plug in play um so that's a company overview and then of course the deck and I try to keep this really simple um again just team overall messaging value proposition and really just kind of using this a as a storytelling um as a storytelling

tool I also try to organize this so that it's there's a big bold statement on each page and then I'm not reading that I'm actually just speaking on top of that so think of your deck as another presentation partner in your pitch um and I would say think of it as your salesperson that's going to open the door for you so try to keep it simple try to keep it highly visual make one key point on each PIR page and organize it in a narrative flow so things that make sense um one after the other and um so you can kind of see you know

these are the elements of a deck it's very straightforward the market the opportunity the product and how it solves the problem an overview of essentially how it works um and then where you're going some validation or key points for your Market segment and that's it so once you have those things together um I'm going to recommend that you plug those into a product called doc end I really like Doc end as a tool because it gives you an idea of where you are in the process with the investor or if someone is offering a warm introduction to you via um your investors we're going to

cover affordable emails in the next section which is running your process but just a quick um quick uh overview here you're going to come into your doc send and you're going to upload your presentation and then what I like about this is that first of all when you upload your presentation you can go in and and look at your presentation at any time um also you can upload a new version without swapping out the links that you share to your investor so that's something you really like which means if you've got a typo or there's an updated product screen you can just come in here

and upload a brand new version and that will actually upload it for everyone that you've shared the link with and so I'm really diligent diligent about making sure that I do this also you can kind of see performance which is which is fantastic as well and you can see performance across versions you can see how much time people really spend consuming the different uh slides that you've put together and where they're spending the most time there's some great analytic Tools in here I really like this tool so what I do is I upload my version of my deck and then underneath I create a separate

link for every single investor that that I reach out to or every single connector that's going to connect me and that way I can always see the number of visits I can toggle on and off the um the link accessibility and you can actually set it to expire with if you want to on an automatic basis so in most cases I'll just say like you know Whym uh time investor name you know here or the connector name and so you'll inser you'll insert the actual investor name or the connector name um I always require email to view because a lot of times there sometimes are

unhealthy be practices in the industry where they're going to share your deck with someone that maybe you don't want it shared with um and so at least this is sort of like a deterrent for that um and I don't allow downloading of the deck because obviously you know if you don't if you want to have Version Control um this is a good thing to do so you can set it to automatically expire I wouldn't put a passcode on it because that's going to prevent your investors from being able to uh forward that to their analyst or whoever it is on their their partnership team that's

going to help make this decision and you know I think just using this tool alone is a great best practice but you don't want to lock the content down too much you just want to use this for more visibility and again like I said if you are talking to an investor and they haven't even opened your deck yet or they haven't reviewed your materials that's a good indication to you that you need to start sort of start at square one but if they have spent some time with your materials or at least open them up it's a great way to to follow back up um

immediately and say you know hey Stella I see that you've opened my deck um you know let's chat what do you think what did you think or you know to give you an indication of whether you move on because your time is your most precious asset in this uh in this process okay so um from there just to kind of go go back here really quick that is your company deck uh sorry company overview your deck um financial model I for stas based companies um I really like the um financial plan that has been provided by uh point9 Capital this particular partner Kristoff Jans I

like a lot of the things that he talks about in terms of how to position SAS companies um overall it's it's a great SAS model if you're building something that is more brand focused cpg focused I think a really straightforward financial and p&l model should be perfectly acceptable for what it is that you're doing and what you'll want to do is of course give your investor a look at uh what your business is going to look like with that capital investment over 18 months so make sure you tie that together with where you are today you don't want to put a financial plan in front

of an investor that just doesn't make any sense based on your numbers today so try to connect the dots with here's our actuals today and here's how we see that you know really growing with the capital investment that you are going to make so that's my advice on financial models again there are a lot of resources out there particular on financial models but less about how to assemble you know kind of this process together which is what this series is really focused on um the last thing I just want to uh cover here is two different things so I put individual data rooms together I

have a master data room that will uh cover all of my let's say get to series a objectives an overview on my merchants and a breakdown of my ideal customer profile uh any uh list of investors that are currently invested and a little bit of background on them and who they are essentially in giving the new investors an idea of who they're investing alongside any kind of uh uh go to market plan of course is really really important defensive ability and competitive landscape and then you can kind of see just a list of other things here I've got financial model and growth projections growth projections

are uh models that I've created that show not only the next 18 months but basically the next 10 years to a billion dollars or IPO just to give investors the idea of how we plan to get where we're going in the long term so uh Financial models tend to be next 18 months and growth projections for me tend to be you know the very long-term or longtail perspective on how we plan to build the business modeling that after you know someone that's come before us or other you know Billion Dollar Plus companies in the market um that we plan to model ourselves at in terms

of go to market or sales approach um or any type of you know key Network effects that we uh plan to take advantage of uh if you guys have any questions on any of that I'm happy to do another minseries on what that actually means and then the final thing I'll just mention here is setting up calendly so as you start running your process sending up calendly I'll cover that a little bit more in affordable emails but this is a great way to get multiple co-founders on the same phone call if you guys progress to calls 2 three four and five so you can do

uh shared event types and uh just single event types so 15 minutes 30 minutes 60 Minutes however you want to organize your time but that will give your investors the ability to um you know really kind of pick the amount of time that they want to spend with you depending on where you are in the cycle and this reduces a lot of the headache around uh scheduling so last but not least I'll just mention also that there is a guide to the documents that you'll need which is what we're covering in this section over on YC now this is a huge list uh and eventually

you'll probably need all of these things within your materials but hopefully this gives you a quick overview on the things I think that are important for you to assemble maybe earlier on and then later on in your cycle uh and next we're going to talk a little bit about how to run your process so again thank you so much and if you're finding this series really helpful please share this with someone you either know is looking to start a company is uh fundraising currently or is uh looking to fundraise in the near future and these are the ways to get in touch with me happy

to answer additional questions or maybe provide additional um insights if there are more questions so thank you so much