At a certain stage of working on your business comes a time when you might need to attract an investor. In any case you have to be very aware why you would need an investor on board and what this will mean for your company.
I will discuss attracting money on the early stage of your business from an angel investor and what this might mean for you and your company.
To start with you need to be very clear about what will you achieve with this money and how this money will move you to the next level. How will you for example go from prototype to launching you product on the market, from a few customers to hundreds or thousands of customers, from no partners to several strategically important partners.
So you need to have a clear plan on what you want to achieve, then put a price tag on it – how much money you would need to achieve this and finally what else you are missing which investor could bring in (contacts in the certain industry etc) How much percentage of your company you are willing to give up for the investment?
So how do you go about finding an investor? The first step should be to try to look within your network, it is best to get an introduction from someone who knows your business or you well. If this does not work out there are business angel associations almost in every country. You can ask them if there is an investor which will be interested in your business.
It is not easy to find an investor and it might take some time. Before you go to an investor it is also good to have some traction, so already some results and it is better that you can show positive growth from month to month and projections.
Basically it is all about practice, you will have to talk to many investors and get many rejections before you find the perfect fit. You should not let this discourage you, you will get better with every meeting and at the end you will find the perfect fit. If not you should not give up and you should look at other forms of financing like bank credit, crowdfunding which I will talk about in the next lecture.
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