Previously we wrote about 3 key things you might want to think about before asking for funds:

• Choose The Right Funding For Your Startup

• Revenue Based Financing (RBF): A Hybrid Of Bank Debt And Venture Capital

• 5 Things Investors Look For In A Startup

In today’s article we point out 5 tips that might help you in making the most of your fundraising strategy. 

1. Pitch in 6 slides: “Like many things in life, less is more in fundraising slides” – says Fred Wilson in his great article “Six Slides”. You think it’s impossible? Well Wilson and Brad Feld have done that. Also David Crow, an emerging technology and start-up advocate/evangelist, claims he can do that too (in fact he says he can get to 7 slides which is close).

So what’s the key to the “six slides” pitch? “How could Brad and I possibly take all that we had done and learned in almost 20 years in the venture business and put it into 6 slides? Two things happened. We learned to simplify our story and we learned how to create six killer slides. And killer slides are not slides with a dozen bullets each. They are six powerful points that combine to tell the meat of the story. So when you sit down and build your pitch deck, think of six slides that will inspire and leave something for the imagination. The best part of six slides is that you will get through them in time to have a real substantive conversation face to face about your business. Imagine that”,says Feld.

2. Emphasize the positives and eliminate the negatives: “Communicating success signals the potential value in your company. We were fortunate to boast a strong sales performance during the fundraising period – something we regularly communicated to potential investors”, writes Jon Olafsson, chairman and co-founder of Icelandic Water Holdings, for VentureBeat.

Moreover, the easiest thing VCs can do is say NO! Thus you need to eliminate reasons for them to give that answer. In other words this means, you need to eliminate the negatives!  “During the process, we addressed three concerns that, admittedly, were specific to our industry, but showcase what any prospective fund seeker should think of in advance:

• No track record – We ensured we had a company history, proving to investors that the product had legs.

• No distribution – We obtained distribution in US, Canada and China, showing we weren’t a product that would be landlocked in Iceland.

• No control of source – We bought the land that houses our spring, giving us the rights to the source in perpetuity”, continues Olafsson.

3. 4 Ms: Momentum, Management Team, Market Size, and Money are the 4 things investors would most probably look for in a startup, says Mark Suster. “I obviously don’t speak for all investors.  But in my experience as an entrepreneur and now spending my time amongst investors I can generalize that almost all VC investments in early stage technology & Internet investments come down to just four key factors.  And they’re easy to remember because they all begin with an M: management, market, money and above all else momentum”. Read the full blog post to learn more about each of the 4Ms. It is definitely worth your time!

4. Don’t hurry – investors like to wait: While you want to hurry and get the deal as soon as possible, investors like to wait. They want to get a green light from other investors they respect before they jump and invest in your startup. In his blog post “High Resolution Fundraising”, Paul Graham explains this nicely: “By far the biggest influence on investors’ opinions of a startup is the opinion of other investors. There are very, very few who simply decide for themselves. Any startup founder can tell you the most common question they hear from investors is not about the founders or the product, but ‘who else is investing?’

 That tends to produce deadlocks. Raising an old-fashioned fixed-size equity round can take weeks, because all the angels sit around waiting for the others to commit, like competitors in a bicycle sprint who deliberately ride slowly at the start so they can follow whoever breaks first”

5. Network like crazy: In his blog post “Notes On Raising Seed Financing”, Chris Dixon points out networking as vital activity of every fundraising strategy. When it comes to networking he advises 4 things:

• Make sure you have good Google results (this is your first impression in tech). Have a good bio page (on your blog, linkedin and about.me) and blog/tweet to get Google juice.

• Get involved in your local tech community. Join meetups. Help organize events.  Become a hub in the local tech social graph.

• Meet every entrepreneur and investor you can.  Entrepreneurs tend to be more accessible & sympathetic and can often make warm intros to investors.

• Avoid anyone who asks you to pay for intros (even indirectly like committing to a law firm in exchange for intros).

• Don’t be afraid to (politely) overreach and get rejected.