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- Building Investor Personas
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Building Investor Personas
Read time 2.0 minutes.
Given the current market conditions, I have recently been advising everyone to cast a wide net and target all investors. Founders simply don’t have the luxury of handpicking who they pitch to.
Recently, however, there have been signs that the market is improving. As it does improve, you should get ahead of the competition and start to use Investor Personas when selecting which investors to pitch to.
What are investor personas?
Like a buyer persona, it’s a fictitious person who is your ideal investor. By developing investor personas, you can start to target your investor outreach and pitch to the specific interests, characteristics, preferences and needs of the investors that are the best fit for your business.
 | Sandhill Markets is the “Robinhood for Pre-IPO Startups”, letting investors get into private deals like Stripe, Databricks, Discord, Anduril, Neuralink and OpenAI. Investing in these blue-chip startups typically involves $100k+ minimums and up to 20% in fees or carry. Sandhill lets you invest as little as $5k with 0% fees. |
How to build an investor person?
Determine the TYPE of investor:
Angel Investor
Syndicate
Venture Capitalist
Accelerator
Incubator
Private Equity
Each of these sources of capital has different check sizes, risk/reward preferences and non-financial support. Based primarily on those three criteria, you should be able to pick one of these types of investors for your investor persona.
Should your investor be a Generalist or Specialist?
This is the next big question. There are many generalist investors who will back any company or have a very wide-ranging thesis. You need to determine if that is the best investor for you (often has great cross-industry networks) or if you need a specialist investor (often understands your sector well and has great inter-industry networks).
What level of involvement do you want from your investor?
Do you want someone quiet or active? Knowing what relationship you want from them is the third tier to building your investor persona.
Are there any specific needs that you have?
Some companies need someone who can get them into Walmart. Or who can get them on TV. Whatever it is, you need to account for your specific needs to round out your investor persona.
Overview
When the market was down, you needed to cast a wide net. As the market starts to pickup, what you need is to build out an investor persona. Start to target the ideal investor because if you have the right persona, you are also the ideal investment for them. As others continue to implement the strategies of 3-6 months ago, you can start to plan towards implementing the strategy of tomorrow, helping you raise today!
Do you know your ideal investor persona? |
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Onwards and Upwards,
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