Name Financial Information Founder Team Advisors Summary Problem Solution Target Market Competitors Competitive Advantage Marketing Strategy Mobile Strategy Revenue Model Funding Exit Strategy Financials (USD) 2015 2016 2017 2018 Revenues Expenses Net Logo Section (Top Left) · Your logo, the lead founder’s name, and complete contact information. · A one-line summary of what your company. It should be immediately clear what you want to do. Financial Information · How much you have, how much you want. Founder Team · The most important section. The team is the key to success: a good idea will fail if the team is low quality. You need a CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, CTO (and perhaps a CRO, Chief Revenue Officer). For each of these, you should find people with 10 years or more of relevant experience at leading companies. This is also validation for your project: if a director from Oracle joined your project, then she thinks it’s a good project. Advisors · Find 3-4 advisors to help with connections, experience, and information. Look for lawyers, CPAs, recruiters, etc. Summary · A two-to-three line summary of your business. Problem · A two-to-three line summary of the your customers’ problem. Solution · How you will solve that problem. Target Market · The size of the opportunity. Competitors · A list of 3-4 main competitors. Competitive Advantage · What you offer that your competitors don’t offer. Marketing Strategy · How you plan to market your solution. Mobile Strategy · Today (Sept. 2014), many companies still plan to release for desktop browsers. That market is dying. If it’s relevant to your project, show investors your plans for mobile and apps. Revenue Model · How you’ll make money. Funding · Your current funds, your monthly spend, how much time you need to launch (the runway), and how much you will need to get there. Exit Strategy · There are five paths for a company: 1) Bankruptcy: 80% of all projects end in failure. 2) Zombie: The founders won’t give up. The company makes just enough to stay open, but founders aren’t getting a meaningful salary. It’s not dead or growing, so it’s a zombie. 3) Lifestyle: The founders make enough to work 10-2 and play golf for the rest of their lives. This is fine for them, but these companies won’t produce a significant return to investors, so investors aren’t interested in lifestyle companies. 4) IPO: If you plan to IPO, then you’ll need lawyers and CPAs from the beginning who know how to make your company Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. 5) Take-Over Target: Also called acquisition, the company is built to be sold to a larger company. Large companies will buy it to: a) acquire new technology/products, b) hire the team (and throw away the tech/products) (also called acqui-hire), c) play keep-away. Just like mean kids in a school yard, a company will buy you so another company can’t get it. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. often play keep-away. (And after they buy your company, they’ll probably just kill it.) d) threat elimination: If you’re growing fast, a larger competitor will use their wildly-inflated stock to buy you just to get rid of you. · The last two are the only ones that matter to you and your investors. You decide from the start whether you build for IPO or take-over. If you go for IPO, then you must be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, which means you’ll need accounting companies, financial officers, and CPAs. This also means you’re building a complete company, so you’ll need marketing, sales, support, etc. If you build a takeover target, the buyer (a large company) already has sales and marketing, so the buyer will just throw away your sales and marketing teams (and the buyer won’t pay you for those.) You also won’t need financial compliance. Instead, you need to know who will buy your company in 18 months, why they will buy it, and how you should structure your company for a quick takeover. · Many make the mistake of “well, we’ll build a company for now, and later, we’ll figure out whether we’ll sell it or run it”. A few succeed (survive) this strategy. But most won’t because the founders were unclear about their project, which means they wasted a lot of time.