How we built our investor presentation and raised $2 million

By Mikael Cho, thenextweb.com, 21-02-2014

If you choose to raise money for your company, you’ll inevitably need to prepare a few documents for investors. One of the most important ones is an investor presentation or a “deck.”

Two years ago I didn’t know what a “deck” was, but fast forward to today and our team at ooomf has prepared multiple investor presentations, raising two rounds of investor funding.

We just closed a $2 million dollar investment from a group of investors we couldn’t be more excited to be working with and I thought it might be helpful to share our process for how we created our investor presentation.

Crafting the best story for your company

For investors that don’t know you yet, your presentation will likely be one of the first impressions they get of your company so it’s an important piece to do right.
There are tons of articles, resources, and books about how you should model your investor presentation and you can drive yourself insane trying to follow each format exactly.
Some investors say you should always put the Team slide first, while others say you should save it until the end. Some say you need to include a slide about the problem you’re solving, while others say there are no such things as problems, only opportunities.
Before you fire up Keynote or Powerpoint to design any slides, it’s important to know the main elements you could include in your story but you ultimately need to craft the best story based on your company’s unique combination of team, traction, product, market, etc.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all template.
Here are the main elements (in no particular order) that we considered including in our investor presentation:

• Introduction — Who are you? What is your company name?
• Opportunity/Problem — What problem are you solving and/or what’s the opportunity you’re after?
• Solution — How are you solving the problem?
• Team — Who are the key members on your team?
• Traction — How fast are you growing over what period of time?
• Vision — Where are you going to be five years from now?
• Product — How does your product work?
• Market — What does this market look like? Is it growing?
• Business Model — How do you make money?
• Customer Acquisition — How do you plan to grow?

Because ooomf is a vetted network of mobile and Web independent professionals where the professionals pick their work, we thought one of the strongest parts of our presentation was the opportunity in our market. The economic shift toward independent, remote work is happening now and is expected to only accelerate over the coming years.
We focused our investor deck around this point because it was the piece of our story where we felt potential investors might say, “You have my attention”: >>>