10 resources for your pitch deck📈| How to finance your startup💰| A playbook to go from $1M to $10M ARR🚀

👋 Hey everyone and welcome to Explore, your weekly Startups and VC podcast.

I’m Hugo Rauch , the writer of this newsletter and my goal is to help founders accelerate their growth, successfully fundraise and find inspirations in startup stories. I always love to talk with my audience, feel free to reply to this email or ping me on LinkedIn! This is a summary of all my research from the week.

Thank you OpenVC for keeping this content free for our readers.

What is OpenVC? It’s a free fundraising platform used by 10,000 founders and 5,000 investors (VCs, angels, family offices). OpenVC provides a fundraising CRM, AI pitch deck analytics and open rate tracking. Use the code: "EXPLORE” to upgrade to OpenVC Premium and get a 20% discount. 📈🔥

Podcast of the week 🎧

This week, I released an episode with Paul Barnes-Hoggett , a repeat founder and fintech CTO that became a startup mentor.

Listen on 🟠Substack, on 🟢Spotify or 🟣Apple Podcast.

10 resources for your pitch deck 📈

I spent a lot of time recently reviewing pitch deck resources for founders. Here is a list of 10 documents to help you craft the perfect deck. 👇

🎨 Inspiration

➤ YouTube first pitch deck https://lnkd.in/e_3HkzU5

➤ Quora's Series A pitch deck https://lnkd.in/e2WATN2m

➤ Square First pitch deck https://lnkd.in/e2YWnnAf

➤ Dropbox's pitch Deck https://lnkd.in/ePcM7Mwq

🧠 Resources

➤ Sequoia pitch deck template https://lnkd.in/edsa78YQ

➤ Seed deck template by YC https://lnkd.in/ebatde-k

➤ Designing a pitch deck by YC https://lnkd.in/eWdjUT2y

➤ Y Combinator series A guidelines https://lnkd.in/eCcrpbx9

➤ A slide you must add to your pitch deck https://lnkd.in/e5ySkJS5

I hope this helps. Reach out if you have any pitch deck related questions! 📈

How to finance your startup💰

Raising from VC is not the only option. Here is how you can finance your startup.

💰Venture Capital

This is mostly for tech companies with high-growth potential that aims to become leader in a certain category. VCs provide capital to fuel growth along with mentorship and industry connections.

➤ Think Accel or Sequoia Capital .

😇Angel Investors

This is for early stages startups. Angels are high-net-worth individuals investing their own money. They are backing startups align with their personal interest and provide a lot of mentorship.

➤ Think Mark Cuban in shark tank.

🤝Community

This is the process of collecting small contributions from many people, for example you could raise from your user base.

➤ You can use website such as Fundable or MicroVentures .

🎯Contests

Those are pitch contest where the winner earns a prize. This is "free-money" as founders don't give out equity and also benefit from the media coverage.

➤ Think Startup World Cup .

🚗 Accelerators

This is usually a 3-months program led by professional investors to help startups accelerate their growth and refine their business model. Additional benefits are in the forms of mentorship, resources and connections.

➤ Think Y Combinator .

🏦 Grants

This is when a government gives you money that you don't have to pay back. It's a bureaucratic and long process but it helps startups get off the ground.

➤ Specific to each country.

📈 Revenue-led growth (or bootstrapped)

In my opinion this is one of the best options. This is the process of growing a company without relying on outside capital. This defines a clear path to profit and usually is financed using early profits.

➤ Think GoPro (the camera company).

The key takeaway here is: venture capital is not the only option. You should be very thoughtful about bringing investors on your cap table. On one side, it’s a blessing and can help you grow fast. On the other side it creates pressure in your business.

Key takeaway: VCs are amazing but not every startup should be a VC backed company.        

Going from $1M to $10M ARR🚀

How do you go from $1M to $10M ARR? That’s a question that every early-stage founders ask themself. To start off, you have to ensure you have enough potential. A great way of doing so is by looking at the goals below. A $1M ARR startup should see a path to the goals below. 👇

Do you have the platform to make it to $10M?

➤ Product resonance with your ICP and early signs of a platform

➤ GTM a repeatable, scalable sales motion with strong customer success

➤ Finance prioritization of investment to drive growth and capital efficiency

➤ Team a bench of experts who complement the founding team’s expertise

If the above seems right then we can look at tactics and example that leads to $10M ARR. Here is a link to the full document but I’ll provide most of the content below.

A path to $10M ARR 📈

Product

A $1M ARR company usually have shown product-market fit but some gaps remains. At this stage the goal is to move from a delightful feature company to an emerging platform.

Best practices to reach $10M ARR include:

• Fulfilling your product vision for your initial ICP: don’t settle for a half-realized vision with singular features, make it happen!
• Exploring upsell or opportunities for expansion: during this process you should layer on additional features that cement the core product but also help expand to new opportunities. Those features should come from early-adopters.
• Sequencing the future for your platform vision: here we’re talking about launching new features on a schedule and leveraging core features as a Trojan Horse to bring in new customers.

You can refer to the document for key benchmark metrics.

Go-to-market strategy

A $1M ARR company usually rely on founder-led sales. To make it to $10M ARR, you need to transition to sales-led and scalable systems.

Best practices to reach $10M ARR include:

• Experiment the sales channel before scaling it up: What do we sell? Who is our customer? Why do they buy? And why do they buy from us? What is an average contract value? Is it more effective to sell bottoms-up or top-down? You should create an early sales playbook and provide it to your team.
• Respect the sales and marketing learning curve. Hire one or two salespeople to start and only continue to hire once those initial reps are hitting market quotas autonomously and lead velocity exceeds quota capacity.
• Formalize a customer success function: The GTM org should become a product iteration and revenue generation org. The customer success should take feedback, troubleshoot issues and partner with product to deliver feature requests and product roadmap suggestions.

You can refer to the document for key benchmark metrics.

Finance

A $1M ARR company usually have a viable product but not a viable company.

Best practices to reach $10M ARR include:

• Map your runway to clear milestones. This often comes in the form of creating an 8-quarter plan that includes hiring, product expansion, geographic expansion, etc. You need to ensure that you have enough cash to hit your priorities!
• Drive strong growth endurance. Here it’s about transitioning from managing the next quarter to the next years. The goal is to at least retain 70% of the growth year on year. Assuming that you want to be growing 100%+ YoY next year, this implies growing at 140% the year prior.

You can refer to the document for key benchmark metrics.

Team

At $1 million, a founding team will spike in some area. By $10 million, they should surround themselves with functional experts that refine the org structure and fill in any skill gaps.

Best practices to reach $10M ARR include:

• Know your superpowers and your kryptonite: make a self assessment of your founding team, find what you miss and what you’re good at.
• Prioritize complementary hiring: founders should start by hiring leaders that have the skill sets and experience that they lack, which will allow them to overcome scaling obstacles without slowing down.

You can refer to the document for key benchmark metrics.

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Hugo 👋