A lot of time and energy is spent crafting the perfect pitch deck. But what about your data room? If you’ve made a great first impression on potential investors, a well-prepared data room is your next opportunity to showcase your story further with the data to back it up. 

Purpose of a data room

Your data room exists to securely store and share confidential business documents and information when you’re fundraising. Investors extensively use data rooms during the due diligence process to examine and assess various aspects of your business, from financial information to legal documents and operational details.  

Key components of your data room

The best data rooms are concise and accurate, making it easy for an investor to write an investment recommendation confidently. To achieve that, you’ll want your data to support your broader narrative and mirror the components they’ll cover in their investment memo to present to the partnership. 

“Investors always appreciate you going above and beyond to simplify their journey of understanding your business. Videos (e.g. Loom), easily “toggleable” models and customer call interviews all go a long way to achieving this.”
Kevin Lu, Investment Manager. 

The data you provide will vary by stage, skewing qualitative for seed-stage startups and quantitative for growth-stage startups. 

We’ve put together a checklist below of all the documents and data points you should include.

Overview

Goal: Provide a comprehensive snapshot of your startup’s mission, progress to date and the investment opportunity. 

Market

Goal: Present a succinct “Why now” and the growing industry or market opportunity in a compelling fashion. 

Product

Goal: Showcase your current product functionality and roadmap, and the resources (e.g. engineering time, money) required to take it to the next level. 

Financial

Goal: Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the metrics that matter for your business, how your company is performing against them and how you use metrics to inform business decisions.

Commercial

Goal: Show you’ve got all your ducks in a row to build credibility and trust. 

Sales & Marketing

Goal: Demonstrate that your customers rave about/can’t live without you and back that up with numbers to show how you effectively acquire and retain them over time. 

Tips & tricks 

• Avoid trickling information. If you’re ready to fundraise and take investor meetings, have your data room ready to go to maintain momentum. If you update the data room, notify investors why or what the changes were to avoid confusion.
• Make it as easy as possible for the person doing diligence to find what they’re looking for. Start with a logical and clear folder structure and intuitive document naming conventions, so that key docs aren’t more than one click away.
• Use a platform that allows you to track how specific investors are engaging with your materials. Monitoring access with time-stamped logs can help gauge an investor’s level of interest and identify which team members are actively reviewing your data. DocSend is a great place to start. 
• Pre-record product demos. Do not have your product leader do live product demos–it’s a waste of their time. Pre-record your demo on Loom (this will also help you track whether they’ve watched it). 
• Pre-prepare customer call Q&A: Save your customers from being pestered by multiple investors by anticipating the questions investors are likely to ask and compiling them into a written Q&A document. As a starting point, we’d suggest:
  • Why did you choose [x] product?
  • Did you consider any other products before purchasing [x]?
  • What problem does [x] solve for your team or company?
  • Are there further opportunities to expand the use case of [x] in your company?
  • How effectively is [x] utilised in your team or company?
  • How do you measure the ROI of using [x]?