Top Startup Fundraising Mistakes to Avoid

This guest post was contributed by BJ Lackland, CEO of Lighter Capital. Raising money for your startup can be a 40 hour per week job—one you have to do in addition to the work-a-day job of managing and growing your company. Raising money is difficult for even the most promising companies out there, so it pays, literally, to avoid common fundraising pitfalls. Here are four rookie fundraising errors you’ll want to be sure to sidestep when you start your next round of fundraising. 1. Not showing investors your value. When you first pitch investors, you need to establish two critical things at the beginning: 1. That your business model is viable. 2. That you’re well-positioned to grow fast. Have some key metrics at your fingertips, such as year-over-year revenue growth, gross margin, number of customers, customer acquisition cost (CAC) plus lifetime value, and projections for the next couple of years. These …
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