The biggest buzzkill when using a tool - loading times, unresponsiveness, waiting... oh, how we hate waiting. And your leads hate waiting as well. Be it for a 10MB download, or a website that isn't hosted close to them.

It's simple really, isn't it? People don’t want to wait for things to happen. It's not rocket science - the longer the loading times; the more friction - the bigger the drop-off rate.

We thought very seriously about this since our inception. Delivering an experience where everything just works - quickly - is what we strive for. It is something that defines us, and that you shouldn't have to even think about.

 



A Simplified Experience

Your material has to has to load quickly, be presented smoothly but most importantly - not be hidden between things that don't really matter.

We went the route to take everything out of the way that doesn't really fit, and to remove between page-loads completely. Your material is now hosted in your own pitchXO web app, with less clutter, less loading and more speed - and just feels better.

 



How we view slides really matters

We went back to step 1 and re-thought the whole idea on how we're looking at slides, and who is looking at them.

Are we presenting to a passing-by audience who swipes them through, or is this rather for interested clients who want to view the details of your slides?

We thought the latter.

This is why your slides will now expand to the biggest possible size whenever they are being viewed. Still too small? A zoom button will appear.

And also for fans of portrait PDFs - we went through all the steps to make sure they look good on all devices.

 



Less waiting makes everybody happy

Whenever you make changes to your material, you can publish those adjustments when you're finished. This usually was a longer process.

We worked now really hard to reduce these times - from minutes to mere seconds - so you can get much faster to present, instead of having to wait for your page to publish.

We hope you enjoy the new experience!

Making investors sign NDAs? Bad idea. However sending your company internal information through email to outside sources? Also a bad idea.

pitchXO is in that sense the closest thing to a NDA. You will know who views your material, when, and what exactly they looked at.

But in order for them to view it, they will need to use their social login provider such as LinkedIn, Facebook or AngelList to gain access.

This gives you the freedom to know what happens with your content - and your potential investors the freedom of not having to sign a NDA - which they wouldn't anyway.

So if you want that extra peace of mind - pitchXO is here for you.

Investors are busy, and you are not the only person that has awakened their attention. So possibly you got the attention of some, and they have shown you their interest. Possibly they might get back to you in due time.

Now what?

Stay pro-active. Update them. Show them that you are in control of your company, and that it's worth it to be in business with you.

Investors hate nothing more than to stay in the dark about what's happening in a company. Use this to your advantage.

You could for example send out an email to all registered investors on your investor page once you uploaded a new deck, updated your KPI or added new company updates.

The benefits are clear :

a) Interested investors will see constant activity from your company
b) You will find out easier if an investor has dropped the ball, and doesn't check your content
c) And most importantly : You hold yourself accountable to your company. Constantly updating your investors will teach you more about your own company than it will teach them.

You can trust us when we say - we've seen the benefits, and they are loud and clear. Those are some of the lowest hanging fruits out there that you can use to your advantage with investors, and we don't meant the board meetings; those are work for everyone.

Focusing on our own product is our top priority. There's a lot of distractions out there that we could go after, or run ourselves - be it a support desk, self-hosting, infrastructure, sending emails, filtering emails, file distribution, file security, web triggers, API connectors, invoicing, payment gateways - even distributed databases.

Could we build all those services ourselves? Yes we could. But should we? No, absolutely not.

Our job is to provide great investor pages, not to re-invent the wheel.

All those services listed above cost less than the salary of 1 employee combined, but they save us a ton of development hours, complexity, brain power and most of all - they save us a lot of maintenance work on things that don't define our end-product.

In that same sense we think about investor pages - should you build your own, or be done with it and have it out of your head?

We've been through it. Investor Relations always start with a few people getting together having a plan. Then pitching it to family or friends; maybe wealthier business people from the closer network.

Then to more known angel investors, possibly with the help of lawyers or investment bankers, and finally raising a seed round.

In the meantime promising employees shares, and forming business contracts based on handshake agreements with other friendly business owners.

Now that everything is rolling, how do we keep everybody in the loop?

We might have 15-25 employees, 5-10 investors from different stages, 1-3 business partners - and possibly 20-50 potential investors/business partners that we spoke to before.

Should we call them up all at once, or one-by-one? How often should we send them updates? Will they be friendly and help our business if we keep them in the dark?

Or, should we make a simple investor page, where they can stay on top of things without having to run after us?

It's your choice

We create pitch decks on a regular basis, and we like to send out the links to them. They contain our confidential company information and so of course we wouldn't want to just write it all up and send it out per email into Nirvana.

That's why investors have to use their social login ( e.g. LinkedIn or AngelList ) to see them. But sometimes we get this specific reply...

"Just send me a PDF"

And panic sets in. Are you going to do it, or is it worth fighting over this?

1. Saying 'No' is OK

As long as you have a reason. An anecdote here is one of our customers who uploaded his PDFs and tracked them with a link shortening service like linkfire or bit.ly.

When he sent out the link to his confidential pitch, it was opened over 300 times from around the globe. "Just send me a PDF?" "No, thank you."

2. Would you send a FAX as well?

People love to replicate what they are used to. In the same manner we still handle business with investment firms or venture funds who fax or courier documents across the globe - instead of simply using Echo Sign. That's when we say 'No' as well - get on with the times.

3. Compromise

If you're cold-calling an investor, you will sometimes have to compromise to awaken interest. A good compromise is to have a short-deck prepared.

7-8 slides that you can send out, without your internal business metrics and which won't bother you by becoming public or leaking to your competition. ( This happens more often than you imagine )

And then follow-up with, "If you're interested in our business proposal and our current business metrics, please view the latest confidential information in our investor area". Something, for something.

4. "I don't want to use my social login"

This could be a legitimate concern, but it also can showcase a diminishing interest or trust in your business. Social providers like LinkedIn and AngelList were made exactly for that - business interactions and to identify business contacts on the web. Especially since it's much harder to share, than sharing an email/password combination or a PDF password.

To summarize

Company internal documents are called 'internal' for a specific reason. Adding the word 'confidential' on a PDF - it has basically no meaning. Anything you send through Emails is deemed insecure.

So if you don't have a trusting relationship with that potential investor, you might want to say "No, that's not how we do business here".

Maps are great.

Nothing displays growth and reach as easily as a simple map. And nothing really leaves such an immense impression than a world-map with your pointers all over it.

At pitchXO we're all about the pitch and impressing investors. Be it your existing ones, or potential new ones. And we believe that maps are a simple, but effective tool, to showcase relatively hidden and spread datapoints in one simple environment.

Add your customers to a map, your office locations, your sales channels, server locations and your team as well. It will give an investor an impressive and quick overview over your ambitions.

Since maps on a slide are hard to work with - e.g. not zoomable, and lack of details - we offer to add Google Maps on a separate page to your investor page.

Because nothing communicates ambitions better than pins on a globe.

For investors there's one thing that counts the most - numbers. No matter if you're talking to Mr. Wonderful in the Shark Tank, or with your Angel Investor. Numbers delight, numbers tell us how to move the business forward.

And with numbers comes also a big fear, the fear of responsibility. But savvy entrepreneurs have one thing figured out. The faster you keep track of your important business metrics, the faster you start steering the ship better.

With so many numbers present in a business, there are only a few important metrics - the Key Performance Indicators, or short KPI metrics.

KPI range from user-sign ups, monthly recurring revenue, or customer churn. But the highlight here is on the word 'Key'. There's usually between 5 and 10 KPI, to keep things short and specific.

Another challenge is getting KPI out of the different systems, which is why we thought deeply about this. We came to the conclusion that there is already a tool that supports most of the systems on the market. Plus it keeps things relatively simple : Google Sheets.

It can connect to your SQL, read out data from an online .csv, or even calculate the formulas itself. You can also feed it data through other tools such as Zapier and IFTTT. Plus everything is in an easy to understand spreadsheet that we're used to from other office tools like Excel.

With pitchXO you can easily connect to the Google Sheet containing your KPI. We'll then display them as charts and historic data in your secure investor page.

Simple really, isn't it?

We tried working with many CRM systems, and we know the main hurdles of them. Number 1 is getting people to use it, Number 2 is actually filling them up and updating them correctly.

No matter if SalesForce, Streak CRM, SugarCRM, Zoho, RelateIQ, etc. - the challenges are mostly similar.

So we decided to do something about it. Why not auto-fill your CRM system with people who've shown interest? Why not use their social accounts data to pre-fill the CRM with the correct personal details already? It would be messy not to do so.

That is why we support all major CRM systems with the help of Zapier. Whenever a lead signs up on your landing page, we take his Facebook, LinkedIn or AngelList account data, and push it into your CRM system - automatically.

Now you won't have to worry about filling it up, and you can focus on going out and hunting investors, leads and prospects. Then when the time is ripe, go over the leads in your CRM of choice with your team.

A super-effective method, saving your time and focusing on the main part of a pitch - the pitch itself, instead of data-entry.

Most people are used to Facebook's timelines. Those are great for personal updates that are shared with personal friends. However, it's really not that good for sharing company updates, as everything would be public and possibly filtered from people with stakes in the company.

We thought about this deeply, and decided to integrate with Google Sheets, to allow for the display of your historic company updates easily in a Timeline form.

Now you and your accredited team, simply have to update a Google Sheet, and we'll display those updates in an accumulated Timeline for your leads.

Now whenever a new lead signs up to your investor page, they'll be able to see how your company evolved over the past weeks, months and years. This is a great way to accredit your company's historical progress as well, and builds confidence in the team.

And if you don't have the time to keep the company updates updated yourself, you can hire an investor relations PA at Shark Digest to do it for you.