We started Odeeo from my Co-founder Amit’s father-in-law’s kitchen table. The two of us were quite the pair: myself, exploring a new post-pandemic reality after over a decade as a leading executive in mobile advertising and app monetisation, and Amit, who had left an impressive career at IronSource to pursue his own independent vision.

But having convinced ourselves, how do we convince investors? We started by making sure we had a fully-fledged product to take to them. We made our first proof of concept at that kitchen table with two laptops and a notebook, thanks to the support of our wives, children, and wider family, and then bootstrapped our way into the IDCX accelerator program, which helped us make the connections we needed to take it to the next level. Both of us had experience in monetisation and programmatic advertising, and when we pitched our ideas to industry friends, their feedback pushed us to make progress on our initial proof of concept. Of course, not all the feedback we received was optimistic. Some friends told us that the industry was too difficult to break into, even if the product had validity. Still, we didn’t lose hope: in those beginning days, our attitude was to celebrate even the smallest victory. Every email response, every piece of feedback, every Zoom meeting, every technical breakthrough - it all laid the foundation of the path moving forward.

This foundation helped us raise an initial pre-seed investment of $1mn from Play Ventures. I cannot overemphasise how important this investment was! It let us secure a tiny office, meant to fit three people, but into which we managed to fit five. Never doubt the resourcefulness of entrepreneurs on a budget. We kept working on the foundations, improving our SDK offering before that all-important seed round, and making sure that our tech could stand up to a rigorous evaluation by potential investors. Especially in the current funding environment, it is vital to show investors that you are trustworthy, and that you understand every inch of your product. We spent a lot of time preparing for the seed round, because we knew we had to make a success of it. A lot of late nights were spent working on what ended up being quite a simple and straightforward deck, but one packed full of the key information we thought would persuade investors.

Another key factor was which investors we targeted. In order to improve our chances of securing investment, we poured a significant amount of effort into mapping out relevant potential investors, narrowing our list down to early-stage investors who focused on the gaming and media spaces. From that list, we then could zero in on the most strategic investors who could provide the highest value for us as a startup. These investors made up our final ‘wishlist’ of sorts, and once it was established, we began researching each individual investor to ascertain their thesis. Our research included reviewing portfolio companies, and we even reached out and spoke to their founders to get their own personal perspective on the investors.

When we finally presented our case, our main objectives were to show investors a) how mobile gaming is the most dominant form of entertainment, with a scalable and diverse audio (opportunity size), b) mobile game advertising had become too aggressive and intrusive, and in-game audio ads would solve this (clear problem and solution), c) why we were the right team to tackle said problem, and d) why now if the perfect time to tackle the problem, as timing is always an important factor in the business world. Connecting digital audio advertising with mobile game developers to create a non-intrusive user experience is a match in heaven - we just needed to show that. You do not need fancy tricks to impress investors - in fact, they are just as likely to look down on overt showmanship. Quiet confidence backed up by data is the way to go, in my opinion.

We started by emphasising the market potential. The sky's the limit, so it’s important to establish just where that sky is. Thankfully, the advertising industry and the games industry are both huge, so this was not a problem. We then moved on to highlighting our own expertise, which gave the investors a reason to trust us. My previous foray into the world of professional tennis has shaped the rest of my career - it moulded me into a goal-oriented person with a never give up mentality. This mentality translated into my decade of experience in advertising, where I was responsible for the creation of novel revenue-generating business models. My co-founder, Amit, has also worked for most of his professional life in advertising, so to a large extent our experience spoke for itself. There is market potential, and now we had shown that we were the right people to capitalise on said potential.

The next step was to present the traditional problem and solution combination to investors. By putting this after we’d established the market potential and our trustworthiness, as opposed to leading with it (which is often very tempting), our investors were already keyed into the project. They could understand the problem quickly and understand why, when we presented our solution of creating a non-intrusive audio advertising experience, we were the best people to tackle that problem. We explained how there were missed opportunities at the moment, and how we can increase the effectiveness of advertisements and connect with this ready and waiting consumer-base, always using plain numbers to back us up. Ultimately, we kept things simple, which our investors appreciated.

The era of entrepreneurship as showmanship is over. The current economic climate does not support it, and investors are more vigilant than ever in assessing the quality of their potential investments. Recent research has shown that investors are increasingly valuing decisiveness and the prioritisation of profitability in CEOs, and this is something to channel into all communications with potential financiers - if we want funding, then it’s time for us entrepreneurs to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.