How to get an investor’s attention

Investors receive a lot of cold pitches via email and LinkedIn, you could be the 100th pitch deck they’ve seen that month, week, or even day!

How do you cut through the noise?

1. Reach out to the right investor
   First of all, make sure you’ve checked the investor’s/ investor group’s criteria or thesis. If they only invest in a specific stage, industry, or region - don’t think you can change their whole thesis. This is one of the most common frustrations of investors with the pitches that land on their desk.
   

2. Use headlines
   → Take 5 minutes to write down the 'headline’ of your business. What is the most impressive thing you have achieved? Use this in your cold emails to investors to hook them into actually reading your pitch deck.
   
   🙅‍♀️ Your headline is not what you’ve done i.e:
   ‘We’ve been in development for 5 years ’
   ‘I quit my job at Google to start this company’
   ‘We've raised 1M so far’ 
    ... that’s great but it doesn’t showcase any movement towards product/market fit - what have you managed to validate/ prove/ move the dial on?
   
   👍 Your headline is the thing you’ve achieved that shows the most validation and showcases either reduced risk or increased reward. This will be totally different depending on the kind of business you're building.
   
   😬 If you can’t think of one or it doesn’t sound compelling enough, then you need to keep working on validation to increase your chances of success in raising funding.
   
   ↓ Here are some example headlines that would stop me in my tracks:
   
   - Generated 250k revenue in our first year
   - Our invention increases effectiveness of treatment of X by 90%
   - 5000 users onboarded in just 3 months
   - Won exclusive contract to supply X to UK government 
   - Reducing the cost of supermarket spend on X by 50%
   - Letter of intent from NHS to use our software
   - We've developed the world's first X
   - 20 corporates signed up to trial our software
   - 10,000 users on our waitlist
   
   I can still remember the headlines of some of the startups that reached out to me that I ended up investing in, that's how powerful headlines can be.