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Get Your Pitch to

50,000
Investors
in the Next 24 Hours
Without Leaving Your Home
S
ecuring start-up funding can be a long and daunting journey. Finding
that connection with an investor that ‘gets’ your business idea can seem
an impossible task.

That’s where Gust (www.gust.com) comes in. Gust is the Match.com of

raising funds. It eliminates the tedious (and often unfruitful) process of
networking with investors, entering open pitch days and spending countless
hours searching for investors that are currently taking proposals.

So far, Gust has 50,000 registered individual investors and 1,000 institutional
investors. Funding found through Gust has surpassed $1.8 Billion. Endorsed
by the Angel Capital Association, Gust can rapidly get your idea in front
of more than 45,000 qualified investors (they have paid $1,000 to join, so
you know they are sincere). Once you establish your profile, you can invite
investors to view it. Then, via your activity dashboard you are able to track
anyone that evaluates your profile.

It’s free to sign-up and share your business opportunity. Here are 10 tips that
will be sure to make you stand out to Gust investors.
1. Get invaluable insights into exactly how your potential
investors think. Gust provides question and answer video
interviews with their leading investors that are free to access.
This will help you craft your pitch to them.

2. Give your business a Gust presence that investors will pay

attention to. Do this by fully creating your Gust profile. Make it
complete, thoughtful, accurate and up to date. This is the wrong
time to just throw up a barebones profile. Answer all the profile
questions, include your company’s logo and create a two-minute
elevator pitch video.

3. The 6 Keys to Creating a Pitch Video that Captures Investor

Attention:

a. Be clear. Investors need to know what your business is all

about within the first 30 seconds. With complex ideas, you
may feel a tendency of over-explain, but it’s more effective
to focus on one or two of the most compelling aspects of
your business instead.
 b. Make it authentic. You should personally appear in the
video. Many investors don’t fund faceless organizations,
they fund people. People they can relate to and find
commonality in their stories.

c. Make the investor feel included. In the story of your

business, it’s not about you. It’s about them. They are
the hero in your story. You are the one allowing them to
participate in a business that will make an impact on the
world.
d. Make it professional. Use the highest quality audio and
video you can and make use of editing software to refine it.
e. Be transparent. Nobody throws their money down a black
hole. But that’s potentially what you’re asking of investors
if you fail to tell them exactly how you intend to spend their
money, and how you will get a return on it.
f. Make it a call to action. Be passionate. After all, if you’re
not, how can you expect a potential investor to be? Make
sure that you end by call them to a specific action, for
example, give them your Skype details and invite them to
speak with you asap.

4. Make full use of the fact that there are two parts to your
Gust profile: the public site and the private site. The goal of the
former is to get you maximum exposure; the latter, to provide
all the information that investors need to take a relationship
to the next step. Your public profile should include everything
non-confidential about your business that may attract the interest
of potential investors, and your private profile should contain
complete, accurate information about all the details of the
business that will lead investors to request an in-person meeting
with you.

5. Once you have your startup profile fully completed and up-to-
date, reach out to potential investors. Simply find them on Gust,
and click “Share your Venture”. All of your material will then be
automatically entered into their deal flow management system,
ready for them to review.
6. If the fund or group has additional, specific information that
they request with an application, you will be prompted to answer
additional questions. Do this just as carefully and completely as
you did for your profile.

7. In addition to sharing your site with investors you find in the

Gust database, you can use Gust to share your materials with
any potential investor, provided you know their email address.
Simply enter their name and email, write a good cover letter,
and click the share button. The suggested draft cover letter is
a good place to start, but take the time to personalize it to your
specific company, and each specific investor.

8. With your fundraising program underway, use your Gust

Entrepreneur Dashboard to keep track of how many people are
viewing your profile, for authorizing new investors to access
your materials, and for monitoring your ongoing interactions
with all of the investors with whom you’re working (whether
institutional, group or individual). There are tabs for each
category of investor (ones you’ve invited, are actively engaged
with, have withdrawn, been declined, etc.) Within each category,
all investors have cards on your dashboard showing their current
status, latest activity, and date you first engaged.

9. Once at the negotiation stage with a VC or an investor group,

use your Gust data vault to share copies of the relevant term
sheets and closing documents with each other and with other
investors. Having all the deal documents in one place makes life
infinitely easier for all parties.

10. After you have successfully raised money from one or

more investors, Gust then turns into your ongoing investor
relations tool. You can use it to file your monthly, quarterly and
annual reports with your VC and other investors. It makes the
information available for everyone in one place, avoids having
stray documents floating around by email, and lets you track
who reads each report, and when.
With 50,000 registered individual investors and 1,000 institutional
investors, funding found through Gust has surpassed $1.8 Billion. Using
the above 10 tips will help you stand out from the crowd in securing a slice
of that money. Remember, the key is using your profile to its maximum
potential and constructing your pitch video carefully.

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