Investment Preparation

Why work with David Urry on your company funding?

Many startups ask David to help them raise capital for an investment round.  David has made several successful private equity investments with investment groups (angels), has helped found billion dollar startups, and helped bring several disruptive products to market. 

David has found successful investment requires a wholistic view of company operations.  There are several activities that need to be completed for a successful company to recieve appropriate traction with an investment community.  Those activities are:

• Management Team Development
• Competitive Analysis
• Market Analysis
• Product Development
• Effective Messaging
• Go-To-Market Planning
• Execution

Investors look at each of these areas closely as they are true indicators of company success.  A weakness in any area will result in some degree of investment community failure.  I'll discuss each one below and offer solutions on how effective marketing and business strategy can create effective investment.  Depending on the state of the company, it can take from 1 to 4 months to develop a company to where it is ready to present to investors.  Investors can take 2 to 6 additional months from first contact to close, so it's important to plan your investment preparation carefully.

Differentiators in the investment preparation:

Competitive Analysis

Key Benefits of Competitive Analysis

• Identification of all types of competitors - For example, some competitors may be automated systems.  Other competitors may be manual systems, existing employees or outsourced services.  The bottom line is that a competitor is any market force that a purchaser may deside to spend money on other than your product.  A well known example of this is that Coke-a-Cola considers water a competitor in the refreshment marketplace.

• Identification of competitive activities - A properly done competitive analysis will tell you alot about how your competitors sell their products, what thier unique selling propositions are, what the product feature set is and how to sell against a competitor.

• Development of investor messaging - Seeing the competitive messages helps develop a message that is stonger.

• Indtification of uniqe value - Understanding your unique value helps you explain to investors and develop a unique value proposition for customers.

Example Competitive Analsis

Generic Competitive Analysis.pdf