Heaptalk, Jakarta – Pandemic has emerged tremendous challenges to almost all business sectors because it plays a role in contracting people’s purchasing power. A million entrepreneurs were forced to shut down their business due to insufficient endurance to the crisis. Even though, Kopi Kenangan, a start-up from Indonesia, has thrived to brave the storm, even obtained an investment of US$109 million in the midst of the pandemic.
Edward Tirtanata, Founder of Kopi Kenangan, has sounded his fundraising experience. According to Edward, before performing fundraising, entrepreneurs should settle the goal obviously to find what they truly need. In his opinion, fundraising is the last option that entrepreneurs should conduct once it is the only way to address their business goal. From this statement, he underlined the prime time to conduct fundraising. For example, based on his experience, fundraising was set as capital to expand his business aggressively.
After defining the goal, Edward said that the goal should be embarked promptly without any hesitation and fear. Both of these presume possibly surface due to the concern in managing the business optimally. Once the entrepreneurs have lost to their shadow, however, they could be late to seize the golden moment for their business.
“Fear is all in your head. There is no better time to be a founder than today,” said Edward in sharing session with Kumparan (03/22/2021).
Entrepreneurs should always be innovative and avoid being content because the complacency that turns up too fast will hinder the business development. The businessman should always set their mindset that in other places, perhaps, their competitors are incessantly developing a strategy to expand their business. At a certain point, the business that were initially thought in a safe position abruptly could decline sharply because they lose to the competitors that always grew their business.
Furthermore, after deciding to carry out fundraising, entrepreneurs should provide clear strategies and excellent plans to impress investors. Entrepreneurs must have an evident model and overview to ensure the investor that their business deserves to receive the investment. The model and overview must be provided in detail that contains the number of growth and profits that were reaped based on the data.
Even though, only a small portion of companies can provide profit data, it depends on the business model utilized. Although the business does not generate the outcome yet, at least it should present the forecast about when earning will be obtained. For showing these to the investors, entrepreneurs have to possess careful planning, such as the number of their growth, loss, the time when the fund can be returned, and market sizing, and all of this planning should be created based on data.
Edward also mentioned the common mistake found in fundraising is the founder does not clearly describe their market sizing. As the solution, the founder should specify what would constitute a market sizing and how big it is aligned with the data. This fact becomes the foundation why data is critical.
“We should answer why, how, what, and also make the structure (real picture) of about our business, also problem that may hit the business, the solution, and how big is our market sizing. I always emphasize on the data, as my principle, talking with data not with English.” Edward added (03/22/3021).
At last, he gave stated that investor will always conduct validation towards the founders, such as their background, education, skill, and character. This validation is carried out considering the problems that will come over the business sooner or later. By taking it into consideration, entrepreneurs should convince the investor by showing manner that they are resilient to tackle all problems that head off their business.(WLN)
