A well done executive summary cannot miss in your investor deck. What I prefer is a one page with all the main info summarized with an appealing design. Being really brief is the key: investors receive tons of docs from startups and they don’t want to read too much to understand what you do, so less is better. Also a good design is important because it can make your info more readable and keep your reader awake. (more…)
Chicken egg dilemma in multi-sided platforms
Many investment decks I receive every day are from startups that aims to create multi-sided platforms. This kind of venture is especially difficult because the founders have to struggle with the well-known chicken and egg problem typical of these platforms. Entrepreneurs need what is called critical mass: a sufficient number of customers on both sides, and in the right proportions, in order to guarantee satisfactory value for both clusters of users and to achieve sustainable growth of the platform. If the critical mass is not reached in acceptable time the platform will implode.
So the main question when starting a multi-sided platform is how and when to gather the various groups of users that the platform aims to bring together. When I collaborated with Prof. Cellini of LUISS University in the writing of the book Internet Economics, we analyzed the multi-sided platforms as a distinctive case of internet economy and some useful insights for startups can be extrapolated. (more…)
Quando si raccolgono soldi da un investitore professionale avere un buon prodotto, le metriche giuste e un buon piano è fondamentale, ma non è tutto. Altrettanto importanti sono gli aspetti psicologici delle persone, la fiducia che bisogna creare e l’empatia. Qui di seguito 6 aspetti sui quali è fondamentale non sbagliare!