071. Tailor Your Pitch To Your Audience feat. Kat Weaver

This is Rich Maloy with SpringTime Ventures,bringing you the VC Minute,quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better.I'm stoked right now,because this is the first week of many where I hand the mic to incredible guests who will share their perspectives.This week we're featuring Kat Weaver.A powerful pitch coach who produces phenomenal content.In true VC Minute style,she has her own quick advice to help you fundraise better.Take it away,Kat.

Hi,I'm Kat,founder of Power to Pitch.I started my first company in college and was able to scale and sell it after winning22pitches.Now I help founders create a winning pitch and connect them to investors in their industries.A really important facet of the fundraising journey is making sure that your pitch is tailored to your audience,AKA the specific investor you're pitching.A lot of the times founders come up with this really broad,generic pitch,they're kind of a one hit wonder.But they haven't done their research on who they're speaking to.For example,I was working with a woman who was pitching her beauty brand to this group of men,and she didn't educate them on the facet of sustainability;80%of companies are trying to go more sustainable.Instead,she was talking to them as if they were to be using her product and understood the beauty business.When we dove into what their thesis was,it actually had nothing to do with the beauty or sustainability business,which was a problem.So she was wasting her time;they were wasting their time.In terms of actually researching who your audience is and what to find,a lot of funds and even angels,have their thesis posted on their LinkedIn,posted on their websites.When tailoring your pitch to the specific investor,it's also crucial to understand is that fund more financially focused?Do they wanna get to know you more as a founder?Do they spend a lot of time in building the relationship?Are they really big on knowing your competition and having all this extra data about them?By understanding those different elements before the pitch even begins,that's gonna save you a lot of time and keeping you from word vomiting,oversharing,and then hitting those pain points.Because they have so many meetings,they're seeing so many founders,at the end of the day,you wanna serve them on a silver platter exactly what they're looking for.