Nobody believes your five-year financial model. If you’ve ever been anywhere near a real startup, then you won’t believe it yourself.
Many founders walk into pitch meetings ready to defend those imaginary spreadsheets to the death, spending 90% of their time on irrelevant numbers and only 10% demonstrating why they are the right people to build this business.
At early stages, angels aren’t investing in a finished product or a flawless P&L; they are backing people. Products pivot, markets shift, and code gets rewritten, but a resilient, adaptable founder who can build a high-performing team endures.
I’ve raised over £10m in angel funding across multiple businesses, and I’ve learnt a bit in the process. Here are three observations from my experience.
1. Problem Over Product
Founders love their product. Of course we do; we’ve spent months thinking and talking about it. It’s an obsession, which can be dangerous. If the market rejects that specific solution, a product-obsessed founder will double down on a failing idea. Angels look for founders who are obsessed with the customer’s problem, rather than their own solution. They want to see that you understand the pain points.
Customer validation is the best way to demonstrate this. Show the scrappy research, even if it’s anecdotal. Show the awkward customer interviews. Ask people why you’re wrong, not why you’re right. Look for valid objections, and work out how to counter them. This shows your investors that you’re willing to pivot your product until you solve the problem.
2. Conviction and Coachability
The best angel investors bring more than their chequebook; they also bring battle scars, networks, and industry expertise. They want to help, and they want to work with founders who can and will accept their help.
The best founders combine their strong convictions with coachability. If an investor points out a flaw in your strategy and you immediately get defensive, they may assume you are difficult to work with. Conversely, if you blindly agree with every piece of advice, you may lack the commercial vision needed to lead.
Active listening is a powerful technique (and one I’d personally love to be better at). “That’s interesting, how did you handle that in your previous business?” Stand your ground on your core vision, but remain open-minded about the route to get there.
3. Show You Can Execute
Some angels will spray and pray – they’ll invest after one call on gut instinct. The ones who add value for you as a founder tend to invest in lines, not dots. A single pitch meeting is just a dot. Your first email introduction and your follow-up meetings with each angel create a line – a trajectory of your momentum.
Angels want to see progress. With Saible, this has meant talking about our commercial progress, which private and public sector clients we’re onboarding, and also our progress building our product and team. In the early days, this meant showing that we could hire high-calibre people in key roles.
Don’t pester, but do send your angel contacts frequent updates. Show them that you are executing on the plan, even as the plan itself may be changing. Speed is a startup’s big advantage. If you can demonstrate that you execute rapidly, validate assumptions cheaply, and drive momentum with limited resources, you instantly de-risk the investment.
Here’s a quick checklist I use ahead of speaking to angels:
- Am I leading with customer pain rather than product features?
- Am I prepared to absorb tough feedback without getting defensive?
- Can I point to concrete momentum achieved since we last spoke?
Capital Follows Capability
When you step into the room, your goal shouldn’t be to convince an angel that your business model will perfectly predict the next 36 months of trading. Instead, focus on proving that you are relentless, adaptable, and deeply commercial.
Ideas are cheap; execution is everything. Show angels you can move fast and prove more with less, and they will back you.