I get asked this question a lot: Should I use an investment teaser? Should I use an investment presentation pitch deck? One-pager? Which document should I use?
As a business consultant for over 15 years, I’ve been going back and forth on what to advise startups and founders based on what they need. The truth is, it’s not only about them; it’s about the market.
Around 20 or 30 years ago, if I were asked this question, I would say create a presentation or write a business plan and send it over to the person. But nowadays, our attention spans are so short that it’s less than a goldfish’s.
In order to grasp attention, a one-pager or an investment teaser is the perfect document for this particular job. The reason is simple. Most products are not sophisticated enough to be explained in a presentation.
For people who think that presentations are going to be judged by their design, most investors are not really going to think of design. Most investors are just going to look at the core product and look at the traction.
These things are perfectly placed in an investment teaser in the form of a one-pager or two-pager if it’s a little bit more sophisticated.
That’s what I advise my clients in our current generation. Always try to build an investment teaser rather than a business plan, rather than a pitch deck, financial model, or any of those things.
Because your eyes, or the reader’s eyes, can see everything at once. So if they’re interested in traction, their eyes are going to go to traction. If they’re interested in partnership, then they are going to automatically go to partnerships.
Whatever they’re interested in, their brains are going to automatically read the whole page or two-pager and then direct them to where they want to look. And that’s the beauty of investment teasers.
I’ve been working on an investment teaser for a while and enhancing it every quarter or so. And we’ve had over 130 downloads for this investment one-pager because it’s the perfect proof of concept that you need.
You could use this template to simply put in your numbers, and then you have it. You have what you need. So you could check out our investment teaser template right here. Download it for free and use it as you deem fit.
Of course, every company has its own branding. So you have to take this investment one-pager, investment teaser, one step forward and actually redesign it or enhance the design based on the coloring of your branding.
If you have a company like Tesla, then maybe we need to change the background to a white background with a little bit of red every now and then to showcase to the world that this is a document belonging to Tesla. You should use your own font. You should use your own logo, obviously. And you could alter the structure based on what you deem important.
Let me give you an example. For Coinbase as a company, as a crypto company, it’s very important to showcase who the team are. Because the world of crypto, while it’s great with a huge market opportunity, it’s full of fraud with the likes of FTX and what they did to the crypto world.
So when a company like Coinbase is launching a new company, essentially who’s running the company, the face of them should be on the one-pager. Shown with their credentials to build trust beforehand. Because it’s such a waste of time if you keep convincing investors or readers with a certain mentality or a business idea, only to tell them eventually that you’re not showing your face, which is proving to be a bit of a sketchy move.
Additionally, the beauty of investment teasers is the fact that they’re printable. I don’t really condone—we as a company don’t condone—printing. You don’t print unless you really need to for the environment.
But if an investor was interested in printing it out to show it to a few people, to pinpoint it, to mark it with their pen or so on, this would be the perfect form. Additionally, writing tablets that are like the Remarkable 2 or so could showcase this one-pager instantly, which makes it the perfect pitch.
Efficiency Over Traditional Presentations
In pitch decks and business presentations, people get to swipe from slide to slide often. And if someone asks a question, you have to return to a slide or have to navigate to another slide. The concept of navigation consumes time, and time is something that we don’t want to waste.
Especially with the fact that most readers, whether those are investors or business-interested people, don’t really have the time or patience to do so. And that’s why TikTok, a company just built on short-form content, is having phenomenal growth. Because all the future generations want the information delivered very, very quickly.
So investment teasers are the pitch decks, are the business plans, are the financial models of our time. You ought to use one at every single instance of your investment fundraising in the upcoming duration.