Early-Stage Data Rooms, Landing Page Love, & Tips For Teaching Your Product

Sep 2, 2022

Hello friends!

Once again, I'm back. And I gotta say, this time, I'm back from the future.

I saw the dream. And it includes mountains to climb, friends for laughs, lots and lots of bikes to ride, and water to stare at indefinitely.

The Mendocino Woodlands and Coast are absolutely beautiful. Bike people are absolutely beautiful. And fully unplugging is extra beautiful.

Now, it's back to work, with some fresh inspiration. Work hard now. Play in the woods later. #lifegoals

Enjoy the weekend!

Data Room Details

Last week, Nathaniel and I FINALLY got all of the legal paperwork for the studio.

This meant it was time to follow-up with our initial set of interested investors. I wanted to make it easy for them to find everything they need to review the opportunity, so I decided to throw together a data room in Notion.

So, what should an early-stage startup share with potential investors in their data room?

According to Math Venture Partners, here's the checklist:

The Easiest Way to Impress Your Future Investors: The Early Stage Data Room — MATH Venture Partners

“How you do anything, is how you do everything.”  We see a ton of data rooms at MATH as investors. Sometimes it’s to support our existing portfolio as a sanity check and most often it is when we evaluate new opportunities. Founders tend to overlook the importance of the data room, the pla

MATH Venture PartnersMert Hilmi Iseri

TLDR;

Before the Term Sheet:

Pitch Deck
Financials
Investor Updates (If you haven't been sending them, YOU SHOULD)
Cap Table

During Due Diligence:

Sales & Traction Numbers
Market Data
Board Updates
Funding Documents
Everything HR
Corporate Docs
Contracts

What's the best way to share it?

There are lots of different ways to share all of this info. You can build a Notion page, create a Google Drive folder, or house it all in Dropbox. Ultimately, the goal is to provide potential investors with something organized and complete.

And since one of the things listed on the data room list is your pitch deck, I figured I'd share this week's Twitter Thread on the topic, from Alex Iskold.

Over the last 10 years in pre-seed venture I’ve read 10,000+ decks.

Most of them are really bad!

💡 Here are things that make your deck stand out in a good way !

🧵👇
— Alex Iskold | 2048.vc (@alexiskold) August 29, 2022

Teaching Done Right

You have the customer. Now you need to keep the customer.

To do that, you need to make sure they realize the full value of your product as quickly as possible. So, how do you do that?

Teach them how to become experts!

I use a lot of different software on a pretty regular basis. Webflow for websites. Canva for design. Ghost for writing. Notion for, well, everything. And I've noticed something about the platforms that I use frequently (and love the most).

They're really good at helping me learn how to use them.

If you're looking for inspiration on how to increase product adoption, check out my recent post:

Want people to love your product? Help them learn your product.

You have the customer. Now you need to keep the customer. And the best way to do that is to make sure they realize the full value of your product as quickly as possible. So, how do you do that? Teach them how to become experts! I use a lot

This Better Work by Lynsie CampbellLynsie Campbell

In it, I take a look at three companies that have nailed their knowledge base and turned it into something more than a boring Resources page.

Read: Want People To Love Your Product? Teach Your Product.

Good Media

Here are two things I consumed recently that deserve a recommendation.

99% Vernacular: Volumes I, II, and III (99% Invisible)

For the 500th episode of 99% Invisible, Roman Mars and crew share the kinds of designs that they love from the places they've lived. A few of my favorite segments talk about...

The Dingbats of Los Angeles (see above)
The With Windows of Vermont
The Queen Anne Victorians of Oakland, CA

The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman

I couldn't wait for a Read More Books summary to share this one. I absolutely LOVED The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman. Maybe it's because the entirety of my high school and college years span this decade exactly. I'm the epitome of a 90s kid.

The Nineties is an analysis of historical trends and pop culture phenomena in the decade of the 1990s. Just a sliver of the topics covered in this masterpiece:

The rise of alternative rock out of Seattle
The Bush / Gore election (and subsequent recount)
Rodney King
The VCR – and video stores!
How the internet changed EVERYTHING

Another one of my faves is from Chuck Klosterman (which I always recommend) is Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

Landing Pages

I know, I know. Frequent topic, but it's because I'm always building them.

One of my goals for this week was to finish up the Welcome Checklist for the Better Work Community. This required the quick whipping up of a landing page.