By Hazel Savage, Angel Investor and Board Member; Co-founder, Musiio; VP Music Intelligence, SoundCloud
Before I founded Musiio, the music tech startup acquired by SoundCloud in 2022, I’d never met an investor. Now, I am one! So I wanted to provide some actionable insights on how you can meet investors, and how to treat them when you do.
What ‘investable’ looks like
When I’m reviewing decks as a pre-seed stage investor, the main things I look for are the idea and the team.
Let’s start with the idea.
For example, last week, I saw four pitch decks from new streaming services with pricing models that claim to pay artists more. Everyone agrees artists should get paid more, but building a streaming service is hard and it’s possible that a better solution might be to retrofit a new pricing model to an existing service. Of course, this has other challenges, such as negotiating with existing agreements in place, but as we say in founder land ‘choose your hard’. Those of us in the industry will be watching this one carefully!
An investment deck is less appealing if you see the same idea repeatedly, it’s great to see what trends are occurring but a space that is too busy is a risky investment.
As for the team, I do love a diverse team. 50% of my investments are female founders. If I get to the advisor page of a pitch deck and it’s all men, that can show a lack of planning and also be a red flag.
But all investors are different. You can easily find an investor who will tell you the exact opposite of these opinions. As is the nature of the beast.
Investor-founder relationships
Some investors just write the cheque. That’s the investor I am. I give you the money and trust that you’re the right person to build the business.
Investors at a later stage tend to be more hands-on. I think the trick to creating good relationships there is open communication. Not long after co-founding Musiio, I set up a monthly newsletter for investors. It was a great way to update people in one go and we got a lot of positive feedback.
On the other hand, when I walked into Musiio’s first board meeting with detailed notes, our lead investor Paul Santos put the paper behind him and said, “let’s talk about the big picture!” He trusted that compiling financials was the bare minimum expected and wanted to discuss everything else. I remember this meeting fondly, it made me smile and it gave me such a great insight into the type of investor Paul is (a great one imho).
Ultimately, you have to meet the investors where they are. But there’s no such thing as over-communicating.
So, how do you find investors of your own?
Recommendations for founders
Write down a list of companies you admire and visit Crunchbase to find who’s invested in them. You can also run searches like “show me angel investors in the entertainment space”.
I do look at the decks I get sent by cold intro, but not every investor does. Use LinkedIn to see who they’re connected with. Perhaps a mutual connection can give you an intro.
Another tip is to look up the VC firms investing in entertainment and find their analysts. All information about new companies being built is of interest to them. So if you message these analysts and try to get a call, most won’t say no.
Finally, I always direct brand new founders to Y Combinator, which I still think has a world class document for pitch decks and explains the exact slides an investor would expect.
Approaching investment is just utilising your network and a simple list of tools. Good luck on your journey!