You feel fairly good about the marketing slides you’ve prepared for the upcoming board meeting, don’t you? In that case, you may be on the incorrect path.
Michelle Swan, a director at the investment firm Tercera, advises founders to “stick with what can be measured” because few board members have direct experience in the field.
Read also: How Entrepreneurs Can Purchase Businesses Strategically
In this TC+ article, she discusses five marketing concepts that your board must comprehend.
- What are the priorities of marketing?
- How are you performing in relation to these objectives?
- What is the pipeline’s condition?
- Are the company and its products positioned for future expansion?
- What are the plans for the upcoming quarter or year?
It is difficult to condense all of this into just five slides, so Swan includes real-world examples to “demonstrate to the board the full value of marketing and the impact it is having (and will have) on the business.”
Remember that pipeline metrics only tell a portion of the story.
Draw a picture of your current market positioning and brand reputation for your next meeting and “create a scorecard against these priorities that you can update and share at future meetings.”
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Not all currencies are created equal. What raising venture debt looks like
In an excerpt from his new book, All Money Is Not Created Equal, David Spreng, CEO and founder of Runway Growth Capital, gives TC+ readers a vivid explanation of how venture debt is raised.
From the informal introductory meeting to “confirmatory due diligence,” this article describes the procedure from the lender’s perspective. Spreng states that you will not need a new pitch deck and that venture debt financiers “have no problem” signing NDAs.
“I estimate that everything I’ve outlined above will take between four and five weeks after our initial phone conversation,” he writes. Thus, you would likely have a term document by the fifth week.
Can the insurance industry recover from the ‘death of insurtech 1.0’?
The startup ecosystem is not driven by enthusiasm cycles, but in H1 2023, “global insurtech funding decreased by more than 50 percent,” Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm write in The Exchange.
Read also: How Financial Institutions Can Strengthen Initiatives to Promote Financial Literacy
Let’s investigate what’s happening with global insurtech firms this morning and see if we can find a glimmer of hope in this murky swamp where many insurtech companies are lost.
Two seed markets’ melancholy histories
According to PitchBook, only 766 seed rounds closed in the second quarter of 2023, a 26% decrease from the first quarter’s 1,044 transactions.
“The second quarter saw the lowest number of seed deals since the third quarter of 2016,” writes Rebecca Szkutak.
If nothing changes, 2023 could be the weakest year since 2017 for seed activity.
Why this founder decided to replace himself as chief executive officer
Many assert that founding a company is a marathon, not a sprint. In reality, however, it is often a relay race.
Troy Bannister, the founder of Particle Health, told TC+ that he began searching for a new CEO after realizing that his skill set did not correlate with the company’s future requirements.
“There was a natural occurrence… that created the opportunity to ask, ‘Is there someone better?'” Who might it be? All of these issues began to emerge, and a plan of action developed naturally,” he said.
Deal Dive: Reinvesting in an entrepreneur after they have spun out from an acquirer
In her most recent Deal Dive column, Rebecca Szkutak examined the Performance Livestock Analytics (PLA) SaaS startup.
The animal health company Zoetis acquired the cattle management software company in 2020, but this week, PLA declared plans to spin out “with $7.5 million in funding from Builders VC and Alaris Capital,” writes Rebecca.
Builders GP Mark Blackwell, whose company funded PLA’s seed round, was “jumping for joy.”
There are eight reasons why the venture capital market is not as dismal as you believe.
If present funding trends continue, this “could be the slowest year for seed activity since 2017,” Rebecca Szkutak says.
However, “we can also paint a brighter picture,” according to Alex Wilhelm, who identified “data points and trends that indicate good reasons to retain some optimism that the worst days for startup fundraising are behind us for now.”
