Startup valuations are based on perceived certainty.
Below is a list of questions that evaluate the perceived certainty of an opportunity.
The most in-demand investors receive hundreds of decks per month, and corporate C-Suites are unlikely to understand the opportunity sufficiently unless you spell it out for them, so not only do you need to provide a huge number of reasons for them to get excited about your business, you need them to be able to identify those reasons to get excited within minutes.
Every question that you can answer positively will create more certainty in and excitement around the long term success of your business, and more certainty means higher valuations.
The key to utilising this checklist effectively is not to use it as a to-do list for changing your business to fit what an investor wants.
Instead use it as a resource to determine whether you have sufficiently surfaced the information required so that someone with no knowledge of the solution you're developing can check them off.
Answer with either a ✅, a ⭕️ or an ❌:
✅ means that someone can quickly verify this from your investment materials alone
⭕️ means that this is true, but it’s not immediately obvious from your materials
❌ means the statement is false
Start scoring quick wins by turning ⭕️‘s into ✅’s. If you have done this and are still struggling to raise, then it’s time to start turning ❌‘s into ⭕️‘s.