Turning Founder Stories Into Fundable Pitches | Kat Weaver | Power to Pitch | Profits on Purpose

Episode Description

In this episode of Profits on Purpose, host Nate Littlewood speaks with Kat Weaver, founder and CEO of Power to Pitch, about the intricacies of fundraising for e-commerce and CPG founders. Kat shares her journey from being a nervous pitch competitor to a successful coach, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in pitches, exploring various funding options beyond venture capital, and the significance of building relationships with investors early on. The conversation also delves into the common challenges founders face, the role of AI in fundraising, and the key financial metrics that are crucial for e-commerce businesses.

Key Takeaways

• Venture capital should be a last resort for funding.

• Storytelling is crucial in pitching to investors.

• Founders should explore corporate grants as a viable funding option.

• Building relationships with investors should start early.

• Pitch decks should support the narrative, not replace it.

• Investors prefer personalized outreach over mass emails.

• Key financial metrics include ARR, MRR, and customer acquisition cost.

• Founders often underestimate the time required for fundraising.

• Buzzwords should be replaced with data and facts in pitches.

• Coachability and transparency are essential qualities in founders.

See More from Kat and Power to Pitch

• Power to Pitch's Official Website
• LinkedIn
• Email
• Instagram
• Youtube

Listen to the full episode to discover how Kat's experiences can inspire and guide you on your entrepreneurial journey. Don't forget to subscribe for more insightful conversations!

I hope you enjoy this episode!

Give it a like, share, and subscribe to not miss the content coming your way weekly.
– Nate and the Profits on Purpose podcast team

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Transcript

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00:00 Introduction to Profits on Purpose
01:00 Kat Weaver's Journey and Pitching Success
03:14 Learning from Pitching Mistakes
05:28 Exploring Funding Options Beyond Venture Capital
11:41 Crafting a Compelling Pitch Framework
14:40 The Importance of Story in Pitching
17:58 Balancing Founder, Product, and Market in Pitches
20:45 The Role of Narrative vs. Visuals in Pitching
24:19 AI's Impact on Pitching and Fundraising
25:27 The Importance of Personalization in Outreach
28:02 Key Financial Metrics for Founders
29:50 Common Challenges Founders Face
33:05 The Fundraising Timeline and Preparation
37:06 Building Relationships with Investors
38:39 Qualities of a Coachable Founder
40:36 Exploring Corporate Grants
44:52 Key Performance Indicators for Success

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Nate Littlewood (00:00)
Welcome to Profits on Purpose, the podcast for EECOM and CPG founders who are looking to scale their businesses profitably and purposefully. I'm your host, Nate Littlewood from Future Ready CFO, which is a go-to fractional CFO solution for seven figure founders who are looking to turn financial chaos and confusion into clarity and confidence. Today's guest is Kat Weaver,

who is a founder and CEO of Power to Pitch, where she helps early stage founders win grants, craft fundable stories, and raise capital with confidence. We're gonna be talking about some of the frameworks that Kat uses for a successful pitch. We'll be looking at some of the biggest mistakes that founders make when it comes to pitching and why some founders are maybe just not cut out for the fundraising process at all.

Kat, welcome to the show. I am really, really looking forward to today's conversation with you.

Kat Weaver (01:00)
Well, I am honored to be here. Thank you for having me.

Nate Littlewood (01:03)
Of course. So Kat, I understand that you are a former founder yourself. And at one point had quite an impressive streak of winning 22 out of 23 different pitch competitions you'd entered, which is remarkable. So I gather that you'd actually figured out this whole pitching thing long before you actually started your coaching business, Power to Pitch.

I'm curious though, is this something that you learned how to do at some point or was it just a something you've always naturally been good at?

Kat Weaver (01:36)
Great question. And I'm a two time accidental founder, meaning I didn't even mean to start my own consumer product business. I, and to answer the question on it being a natural skill, absolutely not. When I did my first pitch, yeah, there is hope. I am a living testament that it is possible. When I would go on stage, my first pitch competition, I thought I was going to yak everywhere. I was so nervous.

Nate Littlewood (01:51)
Okay, let's go to here.

Kat Weaver (02:04)
I totally blacked out. I've never like to the point that it like your whole body tightens up. You don't know what to do. And that happened for maybe the first 20 of 23. And to this day, I still get nerves. I still have to work through things, but it is absolutely a skill that you can learn. It just took so many reps. And the only reason I kept pushing through is it was a means of survival for my first business. I lost everything to a fire.

Nate Littlewood (02:11)
Mm. Okay. Yeah.

Kat Weaver (02:32)
I didn't have a natural network or money lying around. So I just, had to pitch. That was the only way to figure it out. And because I had little time and little experience, I had to put in the reps and figure out, and I ended up figuring out a system, you know, pretty quickly. that became kind of copy and paste for each win over the years.

Nate Littlewood (02:35)
Perfect. Well, that's certainly good news for the folks who feel like they currently don't know how to do this. Your living testament that this can be a skill that you can develop over time. I'm curious when you were going through the process of figuring out how to do this yourself, what were some of the biggest mistakes or blunders that you made along the way there?

Kat Weaver (03:14)
Well, as a business or pitching?

Nate Littlewood (03:17)
Pitching, like was there any particularly embarrassing things that you did with you know while you were pitching or looking back now you were like my god I can't believe I did that.

Kat Weaver (03:27)
Well, I had a fair amount of wins, so things could have gone worse, right? But I will say the very first pitch I did, my mom has a picture of it somewhere. I had my name tag stuck in my hair during the whole pitch. I won that to go into the finals to win $7,500 for the business. But I just kept going, had no idea. And there's this giant name tag sticker just sticking out of my hair for this entire time. And then there was another one where a

Nate Littlewood (03:29)
Hahaha. Uh-huh.

Kat Weaver (03:56)
the clicker wasn't working for my deck. And I truly think one of only reasons I won is because I made fun of myself and I just kind of like laughed through it because there was no other way versus looking like I was nervous and hated that I was there, which was my genuine feeling, right? But because I used humor in that scenario, I was able to save it. And then I ended up winning that competition. But one of my favorite stories is...

Nate Littlewood (03:59)
Hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (04:22)
of someone when I, a friend that I went up against, the mic wasn't working on stage and it was still on as he passed it back to me and he's like, wow, good luck out there. And the entire crowd of people in the audience heard it and started laughing before I had to step out there. And so was like, oh my gosh, no one's even to be paying attention. What if this mic doesn't work? So that wasn't a blunder on me, but I never forgot that because he was so embarrassed after like the little remarks he made thinking the mic.

Nate Littlewood (04:27)
Yeah. I bet.

Yeah. Okay. Good. Good. And so, you know, when you talk to founders, I'm guessing that a lot of them have a bit of a tendency to kind of be fairly fixated on VCs, right? When it comes to thinking about where they can raise money from and you know, who they should be pitching. Could you talk a little bit about

what some of the other options look like. And I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on when each of those different options, you know, may or may not make sense.

Kat Weaver (05:28)
I love this question because the majority of founders I meet want to go after venture, but it is not meant for 98 % of businesses. And I say that because it's a fact that only 2 % of businesses raise venture. But what's even worse is that out of the amount of businesses that raise venture capital, 75 % of them fail. That's a public statistic. And that's a very large amount. And because the reason is venture capital should add

Nate Littlewood (05:51)
Wow.

Kat Weaver (05:57)
fuel to the fire. So essentially, if you don't have a solid plane, it's only going to help you crash faster. And I like to say that venture capital is plan F. It shouldn't be plan A. So really the first plan and thought that I advise every founder to go after is customer pre-sales or we call customer financing. If you're not talking to your customers, if you expect an investor to validate and go help you talk to the customers, you're doing it wrong. You're not a good founder. You have to put that effort first. There's so many options and opportunities to

Nate Littlewood (06:01)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kat Weaver (06:27)
Literally help pay before your product is even in the market. That's a huge thing and help validate it

Nate Littlewood (06:32)
Are you referring to platforms like Kickstarter as an example?

Kat Weaver (06:37)
No, not, not even crowdfunding, like you just building up your own wait list and network and putting a checkout page on your site and promoting it. doesn't even have crowdfunding is I would say that's going be down on my list. The first is figuring out your own ways to kind of help pre sell the product. The second I would advise is doing a corporate grants. That is my favorite option. Corporate grants are, you organizations like FedEx progressive even, and others get tax incentives to.

Nate Littlewood (06:44)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (07:06)
literally give away money for free. will check is in the mail, hits your bank account and it is not a loan. You don't pick back. They don't take equity and the organization gets more benefits of PR and marketing. I won six figures worth and I never had to pay back and help me scale and exit the company six years later and get into Amazon, do good morning America four times. So I love the corporate grant route. Do a ton of education on it. So anyone listening can.

Kat Weaver (07:35)
DM me if they want a master class training I did on grants for that. I would say the third option is debt, lines of credit. If you can think about sources of debt, that seems like a scary word, but debt is cheaper than equity. As in you're better off taking that kind of risk over giving up a forever chunk of the company. And I don't think enough founders think about that as an option. The next on the list I would say is maybe crowdfunding.

Kat Weaver (08:01)
There's a lot of big expenses with it. It's a whole piece within itself. Assume you're going to spend anywhere from 25 to 30 % of what you want to raise on marketing alone. You should have built up a pre-audience. It's not, I'm going to put it on the Kickstarter or a WeFundr and all of a sudden the money's going to flow. There is a lot that goes into that. And then you've got to publicly report your revenue and finances and all this fun stuff. So there's pros and cons to each of these, but I don't think enough founders think about the cons in a crowdfunding, but I would still say...

Kat Weaver (08:29)
That's even a great option before going the dilutive route. And then after that, friends and family, if you've got a great network, tap them in, leverage them. After that, I would say angels, they're more forgiving and more involved than the average venture capitalist. Then after angels, I would say angel syndicates, is groups of angels, you can Google them, that you can pitch and they can collectively invest and decide and invest larger amounts than the average in single angel check. And lastly is...

Nate Littlewood (08:43)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Kat Weaver (08:58)
the venture capital side. is not for the... Yeah, no, like that is literally maybe even after F. I don't know, I lost count. But there is a lot of options to consider, even do them in tandem. And all founders go after corporate grants, friends and family, debt, all these things before even considering the VC route because it's really not meant for the majority of businesses.

Nate Littlewood (09:00)
That's a long way down the list, isn't it? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Got it, got it, okay.

Going back to the first one, which is pre-sales. I understand how that could make sense if you're a founder slash business that already has an existing following and audience. I'm wondering though, if you were not in that situation and like you don't have a big social media following or email list, whatever, and you had to go out and either pay Meta and Google to acquire those people, or you had to invest a lot of time and effort to drive that traffic.

Would your recommendation there change at all? At what point does it become no?

Kat Weaver (09:59)
Because

no, I would challenge that you're missing a lot of options within that. I think not enough founders are scrappy enough in these options. Before spending any money on acquiring a customer, should, there's, mean, today's day and age, even compared to five, six years ago, 10 years ago, the accessibility of people, customers are free. And creating campaigns, daily posting on social media, reaching out to them from LinkedIn.

Kat Weaver (10:28)
to X, to Instagram, to TikTok. I mean, you don't need a following on TikTok to grow and get virality around a potential product or idea and start posting and asking questions for your network. That costs you nothing but your time. And so I wouldn't, I don't advise any single founder to go spending on ads because that's not actually building a relationship or getting feedback from a direct customer unless they're actually paying and it's going to be.

Kat Weaver (10:54)
more expensive to acquire them because you're probably super early in the market. I'm sure the website's pretty low skills. Some of the basic foundations might not all be there. there's lot of events, walking even into farmers markets if you're CPG, getting creative with some campaigns. But there are so many free, scrappy options to go after first, even before dumping money into ads.

Nate Littlewood (10:54)
Yeah. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. And changing gears a bit, let's talk about the actual pitch and pitching process itself. Are there any, you know, really powerful frameworks or approaches that you like to use when it comes to thinking about designing, constructing, and putting together a successful pitch?

Kat Weaver (11:41)
So when you say designing, you mean a pitch deck.

Nate Littlewood (11:44)
Uh, not necessarily. It could just be designing the script and figuring out what you're going to say. I'm going to, I do have some questions for you a bit later about, like the, the script versus the slides and you know, the order and so forth. But I guess, yeah, I mean, what, what are some of the frameworks? Like if we were starting with a new client and you were brought in to say, okay, I want to raise, you know, a seed round from whoever, um, can you help me with the pitch?

Kat Weaver (11:49)
Okay. So the reason I asked is...

Nate Littlewood (12:12)
how would you get started on tackling that?

Kat Weaver (12:16)
So I've made my pitch template public. Anyone can access it. If you go to my Instagram at IamKatWeaver, if you DM me the word template, it is going to send it to you. But the first thing that I work on with any founder is the story. Because an investor in the precedence seed stages especially invest into the founder before the business, truly. Like that's really where the investment is going. And if the founder isn't clear on their story, their connection to the problem, why they're the ones to tackle it.

Kat Weaver (12:45)
driving up a narrative around what that looks like, they're not going to get very far. Anyone can regurgitate statistics and say how awesome their product is going to be, but if you haven't communicated that you're the one who's going to do the thing when things get tough and you've given that feeling of, you're the one who's going to make it possible, then it's really going to...

Kat Weaver (13:09)
make things more difficult and the rest of the pitch comes from that story and how they're articulating the problem. And that's first. I don't change. There's no difference in type of business, stage, industry, nothing. We all, like we lead, that's like one of our core pieces and part of our, so I call it the fund framework in terms of what the order will look like. The next after problem and story that a lot of founders miss is the statistical backup because

Kat Weaver (13:38)
A lot of founders, we like to talk in, you I think, I believe, I feel, but if you don't have a billion dollar exit yet, no one cares about your opinions. Investors aren't going to care. It doesn't matter. And so we remove a lot of that language and a lot of the fluffy buzzwords like it's revolutionary, disruptive, game changing. And then we add in these facts to prove, to back up the problem, not just, the market's growing. It's where's the proof that this is a problem worth solving than solution and so on and so forth through, you know, kind of.

Nate Littlewood (14:04)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (14:07)
The rest the things you can Google, can get from my template. There's some standard out there, but those are the first, the three core pieces that I will start with every single pitch.

Nate Littlewood (14:13)
Mm-hmm.

Got it, got it. So you mentioned starting with the story. Can we just double click on that for a minute? And could you kind of explain like, what is a story? What are the components of a successful story? And is there any kind of best practices in terms of the chapters or the sections that you have within that story?

Kat Weaver (14:40)
Really good question. I've actually never been asked that on a podcast before. So that's a, that's a really great question because I see many founders want to share multiple inflection points. So the first thing is sharing a maximum of one or two major inflection points of the business or why you started, or it might feel like, there's all these different issues that make me want, made me want to start the business or why it came to be. We want to cut the noise. It's not that you're

Nate Littlewood (14:44)
OK, good.

Kat Weaver (15:08)
lying or not sharing things. just that investors are only going to really focus on those core details. You see thousands of pitches, so you don't want to give information overwhelm. So it's one to two inflection points. For example, there was a guy who helping him at a chip business. And he's like, I was a banker for so many years. I left the business to help my sister start a restaurant. I helped grew the business.

Kat Weaver (15:33)
Then we wanted to start a snack company. And then we realized that we were snacking on this kind of chip. So we started a chip company. exactly. I was like, whoa, technically all of this is part of your journey, but it doesn't make it all relevant. And so we pull out the one or two most crucial inflection points that actually relate best to the problem at hand and the solution, thinking backwards if you have to.

Nate Littlewood (15:39)
Right, so that's like four or five inflections there, right? Okay, okay.

Kat Weaver (16:01)
The second part of that and the reason we lead with a story is because you always want to pitch and this is biggest piece here for anyone listening to like write this down and really sit with this one. It's that you don't ever assume you're pitching a target consumer as in they're going to love it, buy it, eat it, take it off the shelf. You want to describe it in a way where they can go pitch it to your target consumer. Like they should have that much clarity around what you're doing.

Kat Weaver (16:31)
to go describe it to someone else because you don't want to assume someone understands the space or likes your product or all those things because now you've cut them out of the entire narrative you're about to share in assuming that. the goal of the story and what I'm getting at is when you invite someone into your world and you add those personal details to the problem, now they feel invited whether they're a consumer or not. And they're going to remember.

Kat Weaver (16:57)
more of the

transformation of what happened with you and the problem more than the actual information that you share throughout. And some people might be more technical than others, but there's always a point of a story. And that helps you bring in and get someone to kind of understand, feel, or empathize with you. If, know, again, they're not going to eat it, they could still invest in it kind of thing. Like one of my, our founders, she is a date by company. She got invested in by Kevin O'Leary.

Nate Littlewood (17:06)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, okay.

Kat Weaver (17:26)
Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank introduces her to this guy to invest and he doesn't even like dates. He's like, I want you to add more sugar. And she pushed back and was like, that's not the core of what our product is doing. We want it to be low sugar, no dot spiking or blood sugar, all the things. And he's like, love that. All right. And wrote her a check. Like he didn't have to eat it, but like that she, what she stood for and what she was doing. So he's really investing in her more than the date buy company at the end of the day.

Nate Littlewood (17:44)
Hmm.

Kat, I gather listening to you describe this story in the pitch that there's kind of a few different elements to this. One is the founder and I guess, know, founder problem or founder market fit. There's also the product and you could talk about how great or amazing or cool the product is. But, you know, from an investor perspective, I assume that they're probably also interested in like, what is the business opportunity? Like, what is the competitive landscape? Like, how profitable is this? How do you think about kind of

Kat Weaver (18:24)
Yes.

Nate Littlewood (18:28)
juggling and balancing those three elements and even are they the correct three elements to be thinking about here? Is there, you know, maybe a fourth or fifth?

Kat Weaver (18:37)
Yeah, it's absolutely part of it. Of course the founder is important, but if what they're doing doesn't make sense or there isn't a market for it, know, that's, they're the next, they're going to hit next. And so I'd say really after like story problems, statistics, solution, then it's traction and validation. Then it's the size of the market and who you're serving. Then it's talking about the competition, financials, go to market business model.

Nate Littlewood (18:48)
Yeah.

Kat Weaver (19:05)
more high level on the team and then really like an ask because the thing is in an initial investor meeting, they're not writing a check. It's just to get to know you and there's you're not supposed to brain them all the information. The goal is to get a next meeting. The goal is then to get into diligence where that stuff is shared in a data room where they can actually sit and get through the nitty gritty details of the model of their market because you know, screenshotting your entire P &L on a pitch deck isn't going to

Nate Littlewood (19:09)
Yeah.

Kat Weaver (19:34)
give them any sort of confidence at all. They're going to actually want to sit with your full financial model and things. So again, it's meant to be high level, but it all stems from story and problem. And the rest are kind of weaved together like a story. And you think about it as like a timeline in order. Because if you read a book out of order, it's confusing. It's hard to get through and remember. And you might check out. So there is really an art to kind of weaving these details together.

Nate Littlewood (19:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm... so on board with this idea. I'm not sure if you're aware, I spent a little bit of time mentoring with an accelerator program a few years back and it is crazy how much more efficient it is to put together a bunch of slides when you actually know what it is you want to say. It's like, okay, this is my story, like bang, bang, like these are the 10 slides I should have. It's, you know, night and day in terms of the overwhelm that at least I felt when I was going through it myself. listen, I'm curious,

in your experience, let's assume that a founder had lined up a pitch and it's a couple of weeks out, maybe it's to one of these angel syndicates, for example, that you mentioned.

And we've got kind of two weeks to prepare for it. Tell me about the relative importance of the pitch slash story, either words coming out of your mouth versus the slides and other visual assets that you might have. Like how much time should we be spending on those two things?

Kat Weaver (21:02)
So I love that I was going to bring up the, when you said when you have the script and then it is easier to write the DAC, we don't review a founder's pitch deck until we fully approved their narrative. Because that narrative is the most important part. We've helped founders raise without ever needing a pitch deck. We've helped them raise with literally just straight that when they have that confidence in that language, we call the DAC like the sidekick. It's a backup dancer. It's just supposed to summarize. It's a teaser. It shouldn't be a brain of all the information. So I.

Nate Littlewood (21:18)
Nuh-uh.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (21:32)
our core is literally outlining that language first and then comes the slide deck, which I hear founders take, I mean, tens of hundreds of hours in updating their deck over and over. And then we go and ask what the narrative is, and they're like, oh no, no, I got the design down. And it might feel uncomfortable because a lot of us are visual, but it's going to cut the time in half because you're pulling exactly what you want to say.

Kat Weaver (22:01)
And summarizing it exactly on those slides, there shouldn't be new information. It should only be 10 to 12 slides, 15 absolute max, because no one's got that kind of time. And this is a doc send or doc hub stat where the average deck gets scanned in two minutes. So no one's actually taking that long with it. No, it's literally like click, click, click, click, click practically. It's seconds per slide.

Nate Littlewood (22:01)
That's not a lot of time, is it?

Yeah.

Kat Weaver (22:28)
And so I have so many founders over index on that and it breaks my heart because they're like, I didn't know I shouldn't be spending this much time on it. You kind of glorify this pitch deck. Investors ask for one is kind of just like a litmus test in a way. But the investor, whether they seem like it or not, make emotional decisions. And that's why they want to hear you talk about it. We're not going to read about it. And so that deck is just a very, very small.

Nate Littlewood (22:34)
Yeah.

Kat Weaver (22:53)
tool in the toolbox, essentially. It's not the hero, not the main event. And for one example is the reason we get so firm on the language is because assume your deck is going to fail. Assume you can't share a slide. Assume you can't show the product or have a visual. How can you verbalize it to someone without needing that? And we had one founder pitching eight investors on a live call and her deck failed. The screen froze and no one told her for the entire pitch.

Nate Littlewood (22:56)
Yeah.

Kat Weaver (23:22)
And then after they were like, did screen work for you? It didn't work for me, blah. And she's like, my gosh, I'm so sorry. And they said, actually, we didn't need it because we totally understand where you're at. Like, don't even bother. It's all good. Exactly. And so that's what we had prepared her on. And that was a perfect example of like, this is why we forced you so hard and like pressed on getting that language right because spending time on the deck.

Nate Littlewood (23:32)
That's a good sound, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (23:47)
It's not what's going to get the check. My new tagline has been, don't get checks.

Nate Littlewood (23:54)
can just imagine that tattooed on your arm somewhere. Nice, nice. I'm curious, Kat, in the age of AI, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how AI is impacting this whole process. It seems to me that there's a couple of very obvious opportunities. One is creating the deck. There's plenty of AI-based deck.

Kat Weaver (23:56)
Yeah, new t-shirt, sweatshirt, tattoo, hat, I don't know.

Nate Littlewood (24:19)
creation tools out there. Like I'd love to know if you're a fan of any of them or that process, but also on the investor side, I mean, some of these angels, VCs, know, funds groups, whatever they receive hundreds, if not thousands of decks and pictures a year. So I have to expect that they're leaning into AI more and more to actually analyze these things, review the slides, you know, look at whatever's written in your email. I'm wondering if, you know, on that side of things, if there's any way to kind of like

hack the AI system, so to speak, and make the documentation that you're submitting, you know, more likely to get picked up.

Kat Weaver (24:59)
So I'm going to answer this a little bit differently than you might want me to. But what I hear from a lot of our investors is that AI has made it worse for them because there's all these tools and fundraising platforms that are scraping investors' information without asking them and then saying that, we have hundreds of thousands of investors in our database for you to connect with. And these investors are getting bombarded more than ever because

Kat Weaver (25:27)
Now their information is publicly on these sites and they didn't ask to be there. So it's actually much more difficult to get their attention. So the founders who are winning aren't using these AI tools for outreach. They're crafting very, uh, what's the word, like personalized messages. I've looked at your portfolio, I've engaged in your content. It's more of a quality game. had one founder who paid for a 15,000 investor email list, 15,000 and

Nate Littlewood (25:32)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kat Weaver (25:56)
Shocker, he didn't get one single reply. And he's like, wonder why. Well, you're amongst all this other fluff. And the investors have told me, they're like, I can tell when they've used a tool, when it's AI, it's like, they don't actually know me. They don't want to get to know me. It's a personal relationship. Investment is a marriage. And so they're going to do this spray and pray model with all these tools. I know so many founders are going to waste their time and keep wasting. And many founders ask us, it's like, craft your personalized message because...

Nate Littlewood (25:59)
Wow.

Kat Weaver (26:25)
These investors are noticing and they're indexing higher now that you've taken the time to get to know them and make sure you're up to the portfolio versus this insane amount of outreach because the relationship does matter. And I will say on the AI building side, none index well enough on the language. I haven't found one I liked. We teach our founders how to fish. We've got tools and resources within the founders that I coach. But it's just, there's...

Nate Littlewood (26:30)
Mm-hmm.

Mm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (26:53)
It's really sloppy. think a lot of them look the same in like pretty cookie cutter right now, I will say. But again, it's not like there's so many free templates out there that there's no excuse. I think like it's pretty easy to get your hands at least on a foundation or use it for a foundation and then tweak it. But I know a lot of investors, I've heard more and more of indexing on, you know, kind of trying to review deals with AI, but it's at the later stages.

Nate Littlewood (26:55)
Mm-hmm. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.

Kat Weaver (27:23)
It really is, I think we're still kind of early in that sense, but the founders who are getting meetings are the ones who are taking the time to personalize.

Nate Littlewood (27:23)
Yeah. Relationships and building them. You heard it here folks. It's, yeah. Central to this process. So Kat, I'm a bit of a finance nerd, as you know. So I hope you didn't think you were going to get away with help me asking you a couple of numbers and finance related questions here. I'm curious if you were working on a deck or presentation for an e-comm or CPG founder. what are some of the top

you know, top two or three financial metrics that you think we should be including in a deck.

Kat Weaver (28:09)
So it's definitely going to be for an investor, annual recurring revenue, ARR, monthly recurring revenue, MRR, the lifetime value of a customer LTV, average order value, AOV, maybe the churn. could be opt-ins even for email, even though that's not a financial metric. Thinking about the actual conversion or cost per customer, customer acquisition cost.

as well as, you know, if some founders are doing with e-comm and maybe retail, like what their velocity is, things like that. But those are the top metrics because again, no one wants to see a full P &L pasted into a deck. So focusing on those metrics are an awesome baseline to start with. you know, also like month over month growth, maybe, growth year over year, those kinds of things, not just...

Nate Littlewood (28:44)
Yep, yep.

Kat Weaver (29:04)
revenue metrics, dollar amounts, it's also growth percentages are going to be important to the...

Nate Littlewood (29:08)
I assume because you're using growth or top line, you know, revenue as kind of a proxy for product market fit and the, guess it's an indicator that you're solving a relevant problem and people want that solution. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.

Kat Weaver (29:23)
Exactly. Yeah, because as you

know, this top line revenue doesn't mean profit. doesn't equate to cash flow. doesn't equate to you actually knowing the message about your customer. I know you know that, but a lot of founders listening here are like, oh, I'm to just share how much I make. We had one founder who was like, oh, I don't want to share my revenue because they're going to be turned off by it. I'm like, if you think for one second you're not going to get asked your revenue in an investor meeting, or they're going to want that and index you on that, you're out of your mind.

Nate Littlewood (29:30)
yes, I'm very familiar with that problem. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kat Weaver (29:52)
gotta be transparent.

Nate Littlewood (29:52)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So you obviously work with a lot of founders and helping them get better at telling the story and putting together the pitch deck or the slides and so forth. As founders come into this process and, you know, begin working with someone like you, what are some of the common problems or themes or issues that you're kind of coaching out of these people?

Kat Weaver (30:21)
The first one is that they don't have to build a pitch deck first. That's a big problem. So many people are like, I already have a deck. I'm good to go. And then we look at it we go, my God, you do not. The second is mindset. I know, I would say this is more of a female founder thing than others. They ask for way less than what they're really worth. two, they feel guilty accepting money or taking money.

Nate Littlewood (30:25)
Okay.

Right.

Kat Weaver (30:50)
Whereas we coach a lot on, you're giving up a chunk of your company, that investor should be lucky and honored that they're given the opportunity to be on your cap table. Not, I'm going to take any money. The right and a mature, advanced founder is picky with who they choose to be with on their cap table. So it's a lot of mindset. Because running a company is mental enough as it is. It's hard enough. And then you add in.

Nate Littlewood (31:07)
Yeah.

Kat Weaver (31:17)
the complexity of a fundraise and investors and now having to report to a board and manage their expectations. That is like another business within itself and it sure feels like it. And the third is, this is a really big one, is removing the buzzwords. Every founder wants the same game changing revolutionary, best in class, coolest. the... Exactly. Exactly.

Nate Littlewood (31:27)
Right. And that was the stuff that you were saying earlier you should replace with data and facts and figures, right?

Kat Weaver (31:47)
My rule of thumb is that if you can take a sentence and paste it into someone else's pitch and it makes sense, that means you need to delete it or add detail.

Nate Littlewood (31:57)
Huh, that's a really good rule of thumb. I like that. Yeah.

Kat Weaver (32:00)
It goes a

long way. sounds really simple, but I was looking at a pitch yesterday where the founder was like, you know, this is going to be game changing for us. And I was like, you don't even need this. Don't even elaborate on this because this tells us nothing. Just get, just completely get rid of it. And they're like, what? It feels exciting. And when you think of an investor getting hundreds of pitches a week, and if they all say that, it doesn't actually mean anything to them anymore.

Nate Littlewood (32:09)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah,

it just becomes like a non-word. It's nothing. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Kat, tell me about the timeline for...

Kat Weaver (32:29)
Exactly.

Nate Littlewood (32:36)
this fundraising process. Like if we knew that we wanted to raise, you know, a million or $2 million, let's say for our CPG startup. How should we be mapping out the timeline for that? And if you were the founder, how much time do you think one should be budgeting over, you know, over the course of their week to actually working on this? Like, is it a full-time job? Is it a part-time job? Are we talking months? Are we talking years?

Kat Weaver (33:05)
We're going to have two full-time

jobs. If you really want to raise money and have those kinds of expectations, you have to be willing to put in lot of extra work. If you have a team who can run the business, well, you can fundraise. Awesome. Not everyone has a co-founder. Not everyone has that kind of budget to do that. I would say this is technically situational. Most founders underestimate the amount of time they need. There's this really great example for this founder that we supported that was, you know, it took me seven months to raise in two and a half weeks.

Nate Littlewood (33:07)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (33:35)
because

the amount of prep work to then actually opening and closing around is so much effort. It's not having a year long open round and just taking checks in and out. You do want to set a timeline to then create FOMO for investors to get in or out and make a decision because they do make emotional decisions. You want them to feel like they're missing out on this incredible deal that they'll never get this kind of offer again at this valuation for your company. And the majority...

Kat Weaver (34:03)
of deal, mean, it can take anywhere from three to eight months on average to prepare and then go execute because the relationship building needs to happen way before you're ready. We say you should start fundraising before you need it because when you do it, when you're desperate, it's going to be a problem. So if you're not relationship building with investor setting expectations or even a lot of founders don't think

Nate Littlewood (34:06)
Yeah.

Kat Weaver (34:28)
You can ask the investors what KPIs, key performance indicators and metrics they want to see for you before you go pitch them. What would make this a heck yes? What would make you excited for us to join your portfolio? And they will literally tell you. And so then you kind of get to build towards that and reset expectations. Cause I bet the metrics that you're thinking of is not going to be the same as what the investor is actually wanting at the end of the day. The macro environment changes, markets change..

Kat Weaver (34:57)
And so it's not a two-week thing. It takes months upon months, especially for people who don't have a natural network.

Nate Littlewood (35:00)
Yeah, yeah. I want to circle back on this, you know, starting earlier thing. I'm not sure if you're aware, but I was a founder once and spent a fair bit of time fundraising. And I certainly made the mistake that you just described, which is starting too late. But looking back, I mean, before I realized that I needed to raise this money, there was a period of time when, you know, I thought I didn't. And I was, you know, doing what most founders do, which is running around like a crazy man, working ridiculous hours, just, you know, trying to

keep my head above water and keep everything going. Now, if you'd said to me at that point, and in that point in time, I would have...

you know, responded if you'd asked like, no, I don't think I do need to raise money. And if you'd come along and said to me, hey, you don't need to raise money now, but you should start building relationships with investors, I probably would have said to you, what are you talking about? I'm working 60, 70 hours a week. Like I don't have time for that. And I don't really feel like I need them. So why should I invest time in that? Talk to me about

you know, that situation and how would you kind of consult or advise a founder who might be having similar thoughts to that? Because, I mean, let's be honest. I think a lot of founders get into this game, this, you know, e-comm CPG space without a great appreciation of how long it's gonna take.

the mistakes that they're going to make along the way, the cost of these mistakes. I mean, you know, like getting into retail, for example, you've got to pay for slotting fees, placements, promotions, like the expenses are ridiculous. And you know, you can go for many, many years with, you know, accruing losses. So what would you say to a founder who is kind of at, at that space in terms of their, their, you know, thought process and they're thinking, you know, I don't need to do it. Why should I waste time talking to investors now?

Kat Weaver (37:06)
Every founder can find 10 minutes a day. That's what it takes. 10 minutes a day. One of the daily non-negotiables for the founders in the program is you have to send message and comment and interact with at least three to five people every single day. That can even take less than 10 minutes. And even that sounds so small, but if you're interacting with an investor's content, you're adding ones you're not maybe aware of, you're getting maybe invited to events,

Kat Weaver (37:32)
You're seeing what they're posting about or sharing or who they're talking about in their portfolio, what growth metrics are they really looking for to really start if you're not maybe ready for it, 10 minutes a day. It's truly that simple because that will compound. Think over the span of a month. If you spend 10 minutes a day messaging three to five people, what your hit rate is going to be, or even asking, hey, we're not raising yet, what kind of KPIs do you look for, like those same kinds of questions.

Nate Littlewood (37:40)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (37:59)
You get to do a little bit of research, but everyone can find 10 minutes.

Nate Littlewood (38:00)
Yep. That's a very good point. Very good point. I want to talk about the people that you do let into your program, and more importantly, the people that you don't.

I understand that not everyone who applies to work with you, you will actually agree to take on. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the screening that you do and what are some of the common reasons that you might say thanks but no thanks to a founder? I don't think I'm the right fit for you.

Kat Weaver (38:39)
Excellent question. We look for four core attributes of a founder. So the first is coachability. The second is transparency. The third is grit and the fourth is passion. If a founder's not all four of those things, we're going to hate each other. It doesn't matter how much you me. No thank you. The coachability piece is the biggest because we'll get a ton of founders who are accomplished great business and they're like, no, I already got it figured out. I just want to pay for intros.

Kat Weaver (39:07)
I'm not a broker. I'm not here to make intros. And if I didn't vet the deal flow, you're asking for a shortcut that you don't deserve. And so if a founder also, you know, we're making suggestions and they're going to be combative, I will happily take out a founder and say, this is not a fit for you. If you're not going to trust someone who's helped raise help founders raise over $50 million and counting 51 million is up yesterday. It's I mean, yeah, it's like, you know, they're ones feel like my wins. And so it's.

Nate Littlewood (39:14)
Congrats.

Kat Weaver (39:37)
We're like an extension of the team. So I can't work with someone who's going to be rude or not ready to change what they're doing. the second in terms of transparency, like founder not willing to share the revenue. I can't help you fight facts. The investors are going to trust you if you're not willing to be transparent. The third in terms of grit is it's going to be so hard. If you think you're going to get shortcuts, if you are going to give up easily, then being a founder isn't for you in general. We love.

Kat Weaver (40:07)
because we do bring investors on our calls. We do make investor introductions. We do want to shout at founders from the rooftop because seriously, I selfishly want nothing more than to make more testimonials, right? They win and I win. I mean, it's a two-way street. I want nothing more for them to succeed. And then in terms of passion, if they're not excited, how can you expect me or an investor to be excited? So it's really, it's more that we're looking for character than type of business. Now we will say to a founder,

Nate Littlewood (40:11)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kat Weaver (40:36)
If it's a lifestyle business or something small service base that's not meant for venture capital, we will say, like, here are other options. We have a grant program, non-deluded funding. If you need less than 150K, 200K, don't go after venture. There's so much non-deluded people out there we can help you get. And so we do have options to help support them if they check those boxes.

Nate Littlewood (40:41)
Yeah. Yeah. So one of the financing options or funding options we spoke about earlier, and you mentioned you'd actually personally had a lot of success with this was like corporate grants. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like, you know, how should a founder start exploring that? Like, you know, is there lists? Is there databases? Like, how can you start to figure out what

even your options are in terms of corporate grants and how is the pitch that you might give for one of them different to the pitch that you might give to a, know, angel investor, for example.

Kat Weaver (41:41)
So many questions in one. Well, to try and hit all of them, though, the pitch is going to be so similar. The only thing that changes is the ask. And I tell our founders, when you have the right script, it becomes copy and paste. Those exact categories transfer into every single grant application. So it's a really, really awesome transferable thing. That's why I say do it in tandem if you're raising or not. Your five to seven minute investor pitch and the ones we help build with my fund method, it's copy paste.

Nate Littlewood (41:44)
Hahaha

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (42:09)
Now, terms of, know, a founder can Google until their eyes bleed to find a list, right? But what good is a list if you don't know how to utilize the list? So if you're pitching wrong, you don't know how to pitch and communicate the business or tell your story and articulate your traction or you're even asked the use of funds. If you are being lazy about that, that list in any opportunity or grant you come by is going to do you no good and you're going to waste your time applying.

Kat Weaver (42:37)
I see the same mistakes made over and over again. so in my, our grant prep program, we literally have them go through that copy paste pitch outline where review and coach them on it live, and then give them the database of 200 plus funding opportunities we share every single month. And now there's 200 in there, but we say start with one to three. It's sound like I have one family who's like, I'm going to apply to a hundred. I'm like, Whoa, don't do that because you should be running the business. Grants aren't monthly recurring revenue.

Nate Littlewood (42:48)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Kat Weaver (43:05)
There are bonuses, there are PR, there are credibility. It is not set cashflow for your business. So you need to be going to run the business. So spending one to two hours weekly or biweekly on grants is plenty. That's really all a founder needs to do because when you have that right foundation, it is literally copy and paste into opportunities.

Nate Littlewood (43:08)
Okay, so is your grant preparation course or offering I guess I can call it is that the same course that you would offer for people who wanting to raise from like, you know, angels or high net worth or whatever? Was it?

Kat Weaver (43:39)
No, so

our baseline to get grants and non-dilutive funding is founders who want to get their feet wet start and those who qualify for grants can be from idea stage zero in revenue up to 1 million in annual recurring revenue. So there's a good range, but that's different because the founders who want to raise, you know, 300k plus to 3 million, that's going to take a lot more work effort. look at the pitch, the pitch deck, most grants don't ask for one, go through the data room.

Nate Littlewood (43:51)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Hmm.

Kat Weaver (44:05)
We talk about investor strategy. bring them investors on for live deal flow. So one of the founders, one of the investors we brought on, one of our founders is up for a Shark Tank style pitch for a million dollar investment because we brought the investor on our call. And so we love to give those kinds of opportunities, but I'm not going to give that to a founder who maybe is in venture back already or wants to even go after venture. So the grant side is a great foundation, but a real advanced.

Nate Littlewood (44:10)
Mm-hmm.

Wow. Huh.

Kat Weaver (44:34)
pro elite members are going through the investor process and we do give them the grant list and help them on the grant side because we say dude in tandem so if they reach that they get the grant portion included on the investor side as well.

Nate Littlewood (44:36)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Okay, cool. Kat, I'm introducing a bit of a new ritual here, which is asking every guest about their favorite business KPI or performance metric. I'm interested to know how often you look at it and why. And to make, because I think you can handle it. I'd love to know your answer to this question from two different perspectives. One, now as the founder of Power2Pitch, like what are the KPI or metrics you look at now for your current business?

If you were back in the seat of being a founder for an e-comm or CPG brand, what was your favorite business metric back then and what did you like to look at?

Kat Weaver (45:35)
I'm such a different business woman compared to what I was in the first business. I've invested in myself and coaches. And so looking back, it almost feels like I'm not even talking about the same person anymore, which I think is a really, really awesome thing. I would say in the current business, so let me start with the first business. I mean, it's not a matter of favorite. It was just in terms of, you know, really units sold. I mean, it sounds like.

Nate Littlewood (46:05)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (46:05)
So basic,

but I did a lot of third party launches. And so in terms of the amount, the quantity that I could do in those third party launches and repeat it, that's actually how I'd sold the business to prove that I could repeat these third party launches with Good Morning America. And so we just looked at the volume and then with the volume, then we would say, all right, how many different multipacks now do we want to offer to increase that volume and that quantity?

Nate Littlewood (46:10)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (46:33)
in our, in our cell phone. So we track that a lot to try to bundle, not necessarily increase prices, but create more value to move more, more product more, more quickly, as simple as that sounds. And then for power to pitch it's how many people do we have in our funnel that we can work to work with us? Now we do turn away lot of founders if they're not a fit, but at the end of the day, is volume in terms of how many people are we going to talk to and engage with that we can make an impact.

Kat Weaver (47:02)
in support because I,

Nate Littlewood (47:04)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Weaver (47:05)
my two next milestones, one is getting founders to hundred million in grants and mentor raised. And the other side of that is helping 10,000 founders become more fundable, whether that's through my content and our direct business. It's truly at my core mission to help founders get funded faster. And I want them to learn what it takes to become more fundable. So I'm looking on that and from two lenses.

Nate Littlewood (47:11)
Okay, I love it. I love it. Cool. Well, Kat, this has been an absolute pleasure. I appreciate all the wisdom and advice and expertise you've shared and encouraging us to think a lot more broadly about where we raise our capital from.

Like we said at the outset, know, a lot of founders go into this process of looking for money and their default is venture capital. But as you heard from Kat today, that is option, I don't know what you said, F or G or Z. It's a long way down the list anyway. And there's a whole world of other options out there that you should probably be looking at before you obsess over.

you know, raising money from a VC. So Kat, thank you again for coming on the show. Where should folks go if they would like to learn a little bit more about you and what you're up to?

Kat Weaver (48:24)
But you can apply to directly work with us at power2pitch.com slash apply or DM me on LinkedIn or Instagram at Katweaver on LinkedIn at I am Katweaver on Instagram. couldn't get my full name on there and on YouTube, but if anyone listening wants to message me the words on Instagram template and or grant masterclass, I'll either send you the grant recording and or my direct pitch template to get that outline for free. It's all there. I want to make this information more accessible. So.

Nate Littlewood (48:37)
haha

Kat Weaver (48:54)
I'm all over the internet there, but LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube are my favorite places to be.

Nate Littlewood (48:59)
Okay, perfect. Well, thanks again, Kat. I appreciate you coming on the show and we'll be in touch. Take care.

Kat Weaver (49:04)
Been great, thanks so much.