Fundraising

Many founders often ask me how much money they should raise – especially when it comes to their first funding round. Should they aim to cover three, six, twelve, or eighteen months of operations? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. The rule of thumb is that you should raise enough capital to get you to the next milestone and those milestones, and the amount of money required to reach them, vary from company to company.

In this article and the corresponding video, we discuss the top five mistakes entrepreneurs make in their pitch decks.

Many startup founders don’t fully understand why it is important to have a company valuation, especially at an early stage. We demonstrate how a company valuation affects the amount of control you, as a founder, are going to have and how much money you end up making in case of an exit with a help of a fictional example.

In a market hungry for immediate results, there is always pressure to grow quickly. But is that always the right thing for the company’s overall strategy and long-term prospects? Here are four situations where rapid growth can backfire.

Human creativity knows no bounds. However, not all great ideas can and should be turned into successful businesses. How exactly can you tell if you have a winner? In this blog and the corresponding video, we present a five-step framework you can use to determine if your idea is viable enough to pursue it further.

The Startup Station is committed to helping you put together credible financials for your early-stage venture. And yet, most early-stage investors say that they don’t consider pro-forma projections for pre-revenue companies as part of their investment decision. So am I just wasting your time when I teach you how to properly formulate assumptions, how to translate your business plan into a financial plan, or how to evaluate the financial feasibility of your business model?

No matter how great your business plan is, how many revenue streams you have, how appealing a business model you created, how big a market you are addressing, and even how efficiently you plan to use capital, it is NOT enough to secure funding for your startup stand-alone. In this blog and the corresponding video, we unveil the other two components that are key to ensure your startup’s fundability.

Not every investor is the same and choosing the right investor is critical to your company’s success. All investors can be categorized by three criteria: 1. An investment amount. 2. The level of involvement. 3. The investor’s role in a company.

Many entrepreneurs think that if they have a brilliant idea, they can easily get funded. They immediately embark on a fundraising journey, pitch at multiple investor meetings, and are flabbergasted why, to their genuine surprise, the answer is consistently “NO”. What is the problem? Why is it so hard to raise money even if you have an idea that can be worth billions? “CAN” is the key here, as we discuss in this article and the corresponding video.

For any early-stage startup founder, there are several key moments that mark the trajectory of the company’s growth and serve as a testament to the founding team’s hard work. To name a few, there are the MPV launch, your first customer, and, of course, your first term sheet. Raising money is a daunting and outright scary task for any first-time entrepreneur, and thus getting that first term sheet from a professional investor is an incredible validation of your vision, product quality, and persistence.