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Investors only buy one thing: great investment opportunities. You need to think like an investor and present your business as a brilliant opportunity for them.

The U2R INVESTMENT PITCHER will help you distil the essence of what will win and lose your pitch. It will also help you to create a compelling investment thesis and story that drives home the winning pitch messages and mitigates any weaknesses. 

Before you can create your investment deck, you need an investment thesis that explains why investors must choose to invest in you.

The U2R INVESTMENT THESIS GENERATOR takes you through how to build a powerful case to pitch, based on seven massive questions that they want answered. When you have your thesis, you can turn it into a compelling story which drives the content of your deck.

Early stage investors accept high levels of risk, but not every business has an equal chance of succeeding.

The U2R SUCCESS PROBABILITY CALCULATOR helps you understand yours based on your ability to win five major battles, so you know how risky it is and can spot both potential weaknesses to mitigate and strengths to sell in your pitch.

Investors are humans. Which means they enjoy and respond to good stories. One of the easiest ways of making your deck stand out and more impactful is to tell a compelling story.

The U2R STORY HEADLINER will help you turn your investment thesis into a story, providing a clear structure for your deck. It also directs the content you need on each slide, which has to illustrate and/or amplify your story.  

Since your deck is telling a story, it will be unique. But just like all music is made up of common notes, there are recurring elements that investors expect to see along the way. 

The U2R PRE-DESIGN DECK TEMPLATE will help you to structure your thinking and quickly craft content as your story unfolds. You can copy, adapt or use it as an illustration of how the different elements you need to include can come together. It ensures you are including all the right points and giving them the right emphasis. And when your final draft deck is complete, you can hand it over to your designer for them to work their magic.

You must excite both investors and customers about your business. The way to excite and standout is to share an inspirational purpose. What is yours going to be? Is it good enough? You need to base it on an idea your business can own and become famous for.

The U2R PURPOSE FINDER helps you pick an idea and develop a compelling purpose, point of view (POV), and vision for your business. Together they create a Magic Triangle that enables you to tell a distinctive brand narrative to attract staff, customers, and investors. Your purpose also injects more emotion and epic-ness into your story.

Investors aren’t interested in solving lots of small problems. They want to back solutions for a big, unusual problem. Preferably something urgent that lots of people are willing to pay to solve.

The U2R PROBLEM SORTER helps you find your BIG PROBLEM, categorising and prioritising the different problems you solve. It also helps you assess its commercial potential, so you know it is going to be big enough to enable you to fulfil your ambitions, and informs both your sales forecasts and market definition.

Good/bad and old/new isn't going to cut it. Investors want to see your view of the competitive landscape and the dynamics that underpin it. 

• Who are you competing against? 
• Which market dynamics are changing? 
• How do the market changes favour your business? 

The U2R DYNAMIC MARKET MAPPER helps you answer these questions in an insightful market map. Find uncontested market space and impress investors with your assessment of the most important market dynamics that are creating opportunity and dictating who will win. It will also inform your WHY NOW? slide, which proves you have got your timing right.

Every business competes with others and the last thing investors want to hear is 'we don't have any'.

The U2R COMPETITION SPOTTER helps you find your competitive set, both direct and indirect and current and future. It will not only help you populate your market map with the right rivals, but also identify some types of businesses you need to keep an eye on so they don't overtake you on the outside lane.

Investors will only support opportunities in markets where they believe they have a chance of winning. Where there are direct competitors in a market you have to show you can beat them. You can't beat them with product features, which are easily copied. 

The U2R VALUE CREATION COMPARATOR helps you to map the value drivers that will enable you to out-perform competitors. It creates a strategy canvas that highlights those areas where your offer is most distinctive, and therefore most likely to succeed. Use it to create insightful profiles of competitors that show why you can win. 

Investors are likely to want to see your financial model before they invest, so how you model becomes important as well as what you model. To do it well you need to understand all the different variables that go into a financial model, make reasonable assumptions for your business, and use benchmarks to check that your final model is in line with industry norms.  

The FORECASTER helps you map out sales, revenue and cost growth. It guides you through the different inputs needed for common business models, so you can be confident you haven't forgotten anything important. There is step-by-step help so you can quickly master all the different financial metrics.

Investors want to know you have a good grasp of what it is going to take to scale your business. You may be small now but in the future you will have a staff of thousands and offices in Monte Carlo and Vegas. What does that journey look like?

The TEAM BUILDER helps you quickly build a staff plan, using common roles, staff numbers, and benchmark salaries to plan your headcount growth and see the financial impact. You can customise salaries by role and by location.

This is literally the million dollar question. How does the commercial opportunity and visionary promise translate into cold hard cash? 

The FINANCIALS GENERATOR projects your detailed Profit and Loss, cashflow and balance sheet for the next five years. This is automatically calculated based on your FORESCASTER and TEAM BUILDER inputs. This is the start of making sure you stay in business and quantifying the investment opportunity you are selling to investors. 

Financials can be overwhelming, especially if you turn blurry eyed at the detail in a bank statement. You need a way of being able to judge whether your financial forecasts are sound and taking your business to a good place.

The FINANCIAL DASHBOARD is a series of insightful charts that help you assess whether key dynamics are right. It also creates the chart you will need for your FINANCIALS slide in your deck. The KPI SUMMARY is a summary view of your P&L, cashflow, and other important operational dynamics, so you can quickly assess useful stats without wading through the details of the full financial forecasts. Together these tools will help you to adjust your inputs and model alternatives, helping you to evolve and perfect your financial model.  

Cash runway is a measure of how many months you can operate before you use (or burn) your cash reserves. Fundraising is an opportunity to extend this to something less stressful than a hand to mouth existence, such as 12, 18 or 24 months. The most important aim is to never run out of cash.

The RUNWAY CALCULATOR automatically calculates what you need to ask for to achieve these target levels of runway. It visualises your business's cashflow so you can see when your business is in danger of crashing. This early warning is combined with a modelling function, so you can see the impact of raising different amounts and types (equity vs debt) at different times. Together, it will help you to get your next ASK right and plan out your entire fundraising strategy for the next five years.

You don't want to ask for too little funding or you will run out of cash. But you also don't want to ask for too much, or you will have to surrender more equity at a time when your business is least valuable. It is a balancing act that you need to get just right.

The ASK GENERATOR automatically calculates how much funding you need to reach a certain month in your financial model, so you don't fall short before you can even start fundraising again. It also calculates how much you need to secure future fundraising based on how long you think it will take, and how much contingency you want. The funding you go for is a judgement call, but this gives you valuable insight alongside the RUNWAY CALCULATOR.  

Invetsors are funding future success. What are you going to achieve with the funds you raise? This needs to be significant enough to unlock your second round of funding, or your business will be left in limbo, short of cash without any reasonable prospect of raising more. 

The U2R MILESTONE MAKER helps you identify the point at which you can start raising again, so you can work out how much you need to ask for now. Simply drop this into the U2R ASK GENERATOR and it will calculate it for you. It also helps you break down interim goals and link your ASK to them, so there is a clear money trail for investors to follow.

Nothing infuriates investors more than ASKs are completely detached from reality. You can't ask for £1m or $1m because everyone else is. Your business must need it and be worth significantly more (unless you want to hand over all your equity). 

The U2R ASK VALIDATOR helps you judge your ASK from an investor perspective. It applies four common valuation methods to create a series of rough ballparks, based on the amount of equity you should be selling. If your numbers are within touching distance of at least one of them, you are OK. If they aren't, you need to look again and adjust the revenue/ASK/equity dilution balance until it is something investors will accept and you are comfortable with. 

Great decks have big problems and elegant solutions. Solutions must solve a specific problem. This sounds simple and it is. But many decks skip over this important step, introducing the product without ever proving they have solved the core problem.

The U2R PROBLEM SORTER saves you from this trap. It also teases out what the main drivers are behind your solution, so you can use these to explain the brilliance of your solution before you introduce your product.

Have you heard the one about the great product that didn't sell? It's because they never got the value proposition right. Good value propositions address customer needs. Great ones address needs and desires. They do the job customers expect, usually in an enjoyable way, and enrich their lives.

The U2R VALUE PROPOSITION DESIGNER will help you make your solution relevant to customer lives, showing how it will deliver better outcomes and greater enjoyment than rivals or substitutes. It will broaden your understanding of customer goals and the functional and emotional needs that need to be addressed. Which is good to know for defining your market, go-to-market planning and selling what you do.

We know your product is brilliant. But how do investors know? They probably aren't your customers and may have no specialist knowledge of the sector. You need to show your product in action, creating value for customers.

The U2R CUSTOMER JOURNEY SELECTOR will help you find the best journey to illustrate your product. It needs to be distinctive, create value for customers, and have a sprinkle of magic pixie dust. Don't show what you are most proud of, show what customers will be routinely using to achieve their goals.

Features need to be treated with caution. Investors prefer benefits. They dread feature overload and wonder 'why are they showing me common industry features or things that can be easily replicated?' But if you can't visualise a journey, you need to share some. 

The U2R FEATURE SELECTOR will help you zoom in on your best and strongest features. Those to showcase will be those customers use most of the time, value, and can't get elsewhere.                

If you don’t have a live solution or any customers yet, you need to show investors that you are making progress and building irresistible momentum.

The U2R ACHIEVEMENT MAPPER will help you to map out and rank significant achievements, based on a simple weighting score. Significant achievements are major milestones that bring you closer to market or increase your competitiveness. You can use these to build up the first half of your business roadmap.

If you haven't yet launched your solution, investors want to know how you plan to do so. Many businesses fail because they underestimate how hard it is to go to market. 

The U2R GO-TO-MARKET PLANNER helps you make sure you have plans to reach and to be able to sell to your key customer segments. You can quickly create actionable, customised plans for both channels (where you will sell your solution) and marketing activities (where you will reach target customers) for launch and the 12 months that follow.                    

Traction is about proving your concept, which you can only do if you are in market. How many users or customers have bought into your dream solution? How many of your hypotheses have you validated? The longer you have been in market, the greater the need to impress with your traction numbers. It pays to focus on strong business fundamentals, such as growth in recurring revenue and low levels of customer churn, rather than reporting the biggest number you can find. It also helps to know how well you are doing relative to industry norms.  

The U2R TRACTION-O-METER shows you how well you are performing against common benchmarks and ratios, and helps you decide which traction highlights to share with investors.

When a business has some traction, investors want to know where future growth will come from. How are you going to hit the targets you are forecasting? They will expect you to have a mix of marketing activities.

The U2R GROWTH MAPPER helps you structure your learnings and plans. It will ensure you have sufficient sources of future growth, based on a simple allocation of resources to different levels of 'proven' marketing activity. 

Investors want to know you are building a magical money making machine. That means your business model needs to be solid. Not just the level of future revenues, but some core dyanmics that indicate how sustainable your growth will be. 

The U2R BUSINESS MODELLER focuses you on the key commercial components of your model, so you can see how robust it is. Great business models generate lots of profit, retain customers and quickly pay back customer acquisition costs. How does yours fare?                                 

Investors are looking for large, growing markets of customers hungry to buy the solution you are selling. They also want to imagine just how large the market for your solution could be. It should be a creative exercise, as you get to define your own market (rather than trying to reverse engineer your business into an existing one).

The U2R MARKET SPOTTER will help you to define and segment your market. The industry standard is to define a total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM), and serviceable obtainable market (SOM). These need to be aligned and labelled correctly.

Investors want to know how big your markets are now and how big they will become. They will have their own view based on their own data sources, but they are very interested to know how you quantify your markets. How do you know if yours is big enough?

The U2R MARKET SIZER helps you work out the different market sizes and growth rates over the years ahead. The best way of sizing your market is to do a bottom-up calculation, forecasting future spend based on solid data benchmarks or assumptions about customer behaviour. The tool will also help you understand if your market is big enough by calculating how much market share you need to become a dominant player. You may need to find a bigger pond to swim in.

Everyone knows timing is one of the most important determinants of start-up success. You need Goldilocks timing: not too early when customers aren't ready, or too late when someone else has gobbled your market, but just right. 

The U2R TIMING VALIDATOR will help you convince investors you are a modern day time lord and have your timing spot on. It uses a simple framework to show that current customer need is acute, the opportunity is attainable for the first time, and there are strong trends likely to propel you to success.

Start-ups are small and you probably have a very good idea of your best team. But you need to make sure they are presented in the right way, you have expected roles covered, and there is balance across the team. You can’t all be CTOs…

The U2R TEAM SELECTOR helps you select team members and advisors to include in your investment deck dream team. The selection is based on what people are bringing to the business and what investors expect to see. It will also suggest potential gaps in your leadership team that have to be covered in future hires. Get on the front foot and include them in your future staff planning.