Do I need a One Pager or One Sheet?

If you are trying to get funding, meet people and sound somewhat organized in what you are doing, you will need a “one pager” (or “one sheet”)– a single page executive summary talking about you, your company and your success.

Why Have a One Pager or One Sheet ?

I’m looking for funding for the Fun Bucket project. We want to make Fun Bucket an awesome product that will profoundly help people. We need money for a ton of things, and a single summary sheet is great for handing to friends, prospective investors and friends of prospective investors. The one pager/one sheet must quickly and clearly address an investor’s frequently asked questions:

• Who are you and what is your business?
• How is this going to make money for me?
• Why is your method for making money for me going to work?
• Do you have any idea what you are doing?
• Have you put thought into what you are doing?

How I Made A One Pager/One Sheet?

I spun my wheels a lot the last few weeks on this. When I was asked for it by a mine (also a friend of an investor), I replied that I had one close at hand. Oops. I actually had three different pitch decks that I had written while building the demo/prototype of Fun Bucket. After I looked for some solutions on the internet, I found the links in this Quora Article: http://www.quora.com/What-should-I-include-on-a-one-pager-a-potential-investor-is-asking-for Quora is a pretty great resource. And the linked template was helpful as well. But after writing, revising, re-reading and re-writing my one-pager, I still was not ready to send my one pager out to anyone with a checkbook.

So… I refrased the one pager/one sheet as a Q & A, and I forced myself to answer those questions. Here are the questions you should answer on a one-pager:

• What do we do?
• What problems do our customers face?
• How do we solve our customers’ problems?
• Who are our customers?
• How do we reach our customers?
• How do you get money from your customers?
• Who else in the world is trying to solve these problems for your customers?
• Why will you be better at solving these problems for your customers?
• How are you serving or working towards serving your customers now? (This is where you would put your chart/graph/table showing your revenue, user base (traction) or plan for next steps.)

I found that answering these questions was a little more comfortable than filling in the blanks of a template. One last thing on format: after you have answered the above questions, re-lable them with the appropriate template-driven headers and make sure they are easy to find on the page. Be unique! But remember that being too outrageous can hurt your chances
and darnit, investors’ eyes are tired!