In order to succeed, you also need to embrace a salesman mindset. You have to take advantage of every situation to sell your business. In your e-mails, in your content posts, in your Facebook updates, in your site, everything must be in place to convince your prospects to invest in your business. Your proposal should be in a prominent place in your communications, one that will be noticed by the people who read your message. So design everything carefully.
Your pitch must be carefully thought out. Tell good stories at every opportunity. Generate trust by communicating adequately and making it clear that you know your trade.
You never know who you are talking to on the other side of a line or e-mail, so be polite, answer their questions, assure them you can make your business successful, and bring them to your side. Sometimes, the other person is just a small investor, but you can run across people who have tens of thousands to invest, and those are more likely to put money in your company in the early stages than the former, who usually jump into a business after it shows a possibility of being successful. Bear that in mind.
Beware of competitors knowing your business secrets
When crowdfunding or crowdsourcing, you need to expose your plans to many people who are complete strangers. As you cannot sign a Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA) with everyone, your business is exposed if you reveal too many details.
What makes matters worse is that many people will only put their money in a business after careful thought, especially if it is a big sum.
But there is a way you can make sure investors get proper information while staying relatively safe. Before someone asks for more details, you can ask how much that person is willing to invest. If it is a sizable amount, you can ask them to identify themselves and then sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with that person. A scanned contract should provide you with reasonable protection.
In this case, if someone decides to expose your plans or blow your project in a forum, you know the people who could get deep details of your business and act accordingly are limited. Plus, someone who signs such an agreement will not be inclined to mess things up, so they are likely to treat you in a lawful manner.
Protect your intellectual property with proper registrations, such as provisional patents, and work on some agreements for high-profile investors and you should be safe. By taking those measures, you can also make your business look well-structured, which, in turn, makes your project more appealing to investors. It’s a cheap measure that can do wonders for your new venture.
This article is part of a series of practical steps that you can take to be successful in equity crowdfunding. Keep reading our equity crowdfunding mindset series for more.
Source: icnw