Without a clear ask, your pitch deck is useless

You have brushed off your keynote skills, you are excited that you will finally be able to pay yourself a living wage, and you are ready to start pitching your startup to investors. It is heady times but you may be forgetting something.

After working with hundreds of founders on raising money, there is one slide that most of them get woefully wrong. The slide is called The Ask. One investor friend called it the "what is my $10 million going to buy me?" slide.

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It makes sense that the Ask is a sensitive topic for many inexperienced entrepreneurs. There are a lot of different ways to build a startup, and trying to right-size a funding round can be difficult. You can do things differently if you raised $8 million. If you raised $12 million, you may be able to launch more features of your product a little faster, experiment more, or go after an additional market earlier. You're aware of that. The senior staff is aware of that. Your investors are aware of that. You need a plan.

What do those key metrics need to look like in order to raise not this round of funding, but your next one?

What do you need to do?

A lot of founders will tell you that they are trying to raise enough money to stay alive. Regardless of how much you raise, that will be true. Think about what you need to accomplish in order to raise your next round of funding and then work backwards from there. This may be a combination of metrics and goals.

Over time, metrics are the measurement parts of your business. The number of sales, average order value, monthly or annual recurring revenue, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, daily and monthly are some of the metrics you can use. In order to raise not this round of funding, but your next one, what are those key metrics?

If you don't hit a milestone, you won't be tracked over time, but if you do hit a milestone, you'll be tracked over time. Finding the perfect CFO that can help take your company public is a big milestone for a lot of companies. Launching your app in Spanish and French is one of the important milestone. The first time you make a dollar from a customer is a big shift in the business. When a customer makes you more money than it costs you to acquire them is a different story. A milestone for earlier stage companies is talking to 100 potential customers.

You need to map out a set of milestones in order to get validation for your company. Trigger points for metrics include hitting $1 million ARR, having 5,000 daily active users or a combination of customer acquisition channels, for example.

To put together a great ask slide, you need to know how much you need to raise, how to create a specific set of goals, and how to bring it all together.