How to get investors in 2025

So as we head into two thousand and twenty five. What do founders looking for funding need to focus on to get attention from investors? When I say that, you know, long gone are the days of somebody at a bar writes on a napkin, they're getting ten million dollars. And I talk to people all the time where they hear about something in the happened in Silicon Valley, this with this pitch deck and they got one hundred million. So I should be able to get the same in Canada. Well, first of all, all of that's gone and it never really existed in Canada. Secondly, if that's gone, what do founders need to do to impress investors as we move forward into the twenty twenty five? Yeah, I can I can kick things off if you don't mind. Because I work with a lot of founders and a lot of the founders I'm working with are raising often for their first time. the biggest challenge they have and what investors are looking for is traction, traction and actual revenues, whether it's through pilots or actual revenues from paying customers. It's kind of a critical component. And actually, to add to what Craig said, there was a time when There was the napkin, but there was also the I've got a great idea and I've got a hundred thousand followers, but no paid customers. Oh, where can I write a check? That doesn't really happen anymore either. You need paying customers. That's my opinion. A lot of the companies I'm working with are pre-revenue and they're having a really tough time raising capital pre-revenue. Yeah, I'll mirror what Jeff was saying. One thing we've really seen as a sort of trend across the whole industry, capital raising industry from investors, specifically in Canada, is really since kind of twenty twenty two, we've had a real pullback of investors who are interested in investing in pre-revenue sort of very early stage companies. While that still, yes, can happen sometimes in Silicon Valley. And so people like to refer to that, certainly in Canada. investors these days want to see post revenue deals. One way that I often describe it and builds on the whole traction point that Jeff made is when you approach an investor, The investor needs to get a clear understanding and they want to feel from you that what you're building, your company is, you know, the proverbial rocket that's already taking off. It's not, hey, Mr. Investor, if you give me a million dollars, I'll build you a rocket and then we'll take off. They want to hear we built a rocket. It's fueled. We're taking off. You can invest a million dollars and get on the rocket with us or you can just watch us fly by. And so if you think about that sort of allegory a little bit as an example, you need to be in a situation where you're getting everything done or as much as you can done without the funding. You don't want to be approaching investors saying, I would do this if only you gave me a million dollars. You want to say, I have traction here. I have more customers here. But if you give me money, we can do it faster. I might steal that idea, Alex. Thanks. No problem. No problem. Good explanation. Anyone else want to jump in on that? Yeah, well, the thing that I'm seeing nowadays talking to investors and what they're looking for is some things for prioritization would be product market fit, strong business fundamentals, scalable solutions are really pertinent just to kind of get down to like the first principles or fundamentals, right? Yeah. Another thing obviously that investors, and feel free to jump in guys on the angel side, but there almost has to be an AI element to it nowadays to even just to get investors to even keep listening to your pitch. John, have you seen any pitches that don't say AI? not now well yes and then I tell them yeah you should put in some you should add in some sort of ai element even if it's uh but yeah um the other thing too that that I find is is is becoming in the last couple years is is social impact so like esg environmental social governance metrics um are becoming increasingly important but um again I'm not on the investor side I do work with investors but um feel free those are who are in the thick of things to to uh to correct me if I've said anything that's inaccurate so let's jump to this next one here oh I was just gonna say from from my perspective um and I probably uh sounds a little bit counter to maybe the rest of the group but jump in often more on the pre-revenue side but um For me, two things that we're actively looking for is ability of the founding team to kind of reach meaningful customer depth and customer audience. So whether or not they've got customers kind of signed up, but showing they've had significant conversations with their target audience, with their kind of early engagement and The other is products that are painkillers versus vitamins. I'm sure lots have heard of that, but like too often we see pitches and it's like, well, that would be nice to have. Or it's like, oh, that would be cool. I've seen so many pitches, especially in the AI space of like this data. So it's going to be amazing. It's going to automate everything. We just need a really clean CRM from every client we sell to. And it's like, have you spent time in a CRM for most companies? Yeah. Unless you can ingest garbage, that's not going to happen. And so I get excited when we start to see companies that are solving real pain that when you put it in front of customers, they're kind of like, we need this yesterday. Like, how quickly can I pay you for it? And can I pay you to get it faster versus like, ah, yeah, huge uphill battle to like try and wedge it in amongst eight other tools. So. For me, it's less about kind of here's the rocket, we're already in space, come along, and more here's the rocket that people are actually genuinely excited to get and fills a pretty significant gap operationally because that we get pretty excited about.