#civictech Startup Stories - The First Pitch

We just had a first round interview with Matter.vc. Here’s what we learned.

CivicMakers was recently selected to give a 10-minute pitch on our civic tech knowledge sharing platform to the team at Matter. It was an honor to be chosen — apparently only 2.5% of applicants made it to the first round for Matter’s Program 6 — and we had a great time sharing our vision for accelerating civic impact. We learned a bunch.

In the spirit of shared learning, here are the questions we fielded during the 10-minute Q&A portion directly following our pitch:

• User experience: how do I find your app? why would I use it? what does it do?
• How do you make this sustainable?
• What does your organization look like at scale?
• Why do you want VC funding? Why Matter?
• How will you guard your competitive advantage?
• How do you make FOSS projects sustainable?
• What technology are you using?
• Why open source? What license?
• What will you present at demo day?

We’re now thinking about how to embed answers to these questions outright in our next pitch. Hopefully this can help you hone your next pitch, too!

What we’d do differently:

• Add a slide conveying the User Journey that speaks to the UX questions above: User Acquisition, Activation, Retention and Referral.
• Speak directly to why we are interested in (and how we can benefit) the Matter program.
• Matter was not as revenue-forward as some investors we’ve talked to, but we would still beef up our Revenue streams slide.
• 10 minutes goes by fast! It can be difficult to convey broad vision and detailed action in the right amount. Next time, be more succinct. (Try to get through more of their questions, so we could learn more).

What we’d like to know:

• When a mission-driven fund or foundation invests in a company, what are they investing in? For example, for how much “impact” does $10,000 buy?
• What are the measurements for success, and how are funders and impact investors defining “scale?”

We sincerely hope this is helpful in some way. If it is, share a comment. If not, what would be helpful?

Thanks to Ryan Wold and judi lynn brown for co-writing this piece.