Understanding the Commercial Opportunity, Competitive Landscape, and your Value-Add

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• What is the market opportunity? What problem are you solving? How many people have this problem? How big is this market now, and how big is it likely to be in five years?

• What is your solution? How exactly does your product/service solve this problem or improve on pain points compared to existing solutions?

• How is your solution superior to the status quo? What is the history of attempts to address/solve this problem? What has been tried, and critically why have other approaches failed to succeed? What are you doing differently than others?

• What are customers willing to pay for your solution, and importantly why are they willing to pay this? Do you save them money? Do you enable new commercial opportunities for your customers? Do you improve convenience?

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Execution Plan, Key Milestones, Cost of Execution and Cash Needs

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• How much capital are your raising? How much capital have you already raised, if any?

• Are you looking for valuation feedback or a lead investor for the round, or is it already priced with no valuation or structuring flexibility?

• What are the key commercial milestones you need to achieve in the next 3, 6, and 12 months?

• What is your longer-term execution plan, and what are metrics that can be used to assess progress and success?

• What is the cost and/or what are the cash needs to hit each of these milestones?

• Is cash primarily being used for payroll or new hires? Or is it being spent on inventory, capital equipment, marketing, or something else?

• What is the cash runway for the company post completion of the raise in your base/central case?

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Alternative Execution Plans, Risk Mitigation and Planning

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• Have you thought through alternative strategies for growth? Why did you choose one approach over another? Is the cash cost and cash burn comparable across the various strategies to achieve similar end goals, or do some approaches have higher capital/cash needs?

• What are the most salient risks in the next 3, 6 and 12 months?

• What are the longer-term risks over the next 1-3 years? Over the next five years?

• What strategies have you prepared to mitigate or overcome these foreseeable risks?

• If the current execution plan is struggling, how will you identify that early-on, and what would be your contingency plans?

• If you were forced to execute your plan with one-half of the capital you are hoping to raise, what would change in your business plan and key milestones?

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