How to Prepare IR Materials

What are IR materials?

IR is an abbreviation for Investor Relations. It is an umbrella term for all materials and activities required to explain and promote a company to investors, build relationships, and raise investment. In practice, “IR materials” usually refers to the materials a company presents to investors for fundraising.

What to include in IR materials

Because the purpose of IR materials is fundraising, you need to persuasively present—from an investor’s perspective—why they should invest in your company. Accordingly, you should cover the business end-to-end, including a service summary, market landscape, product/service description, competitive landscape, traction, business model, growth plans, and team.

• Pitch Deck:
  • The goal is to make a short, strong, and positive first impression on a broad set of potential investors
  • Used in early-stage fundraising
  • Typically 10–15 slides; concise and highly visual
• IR Deck:
  • Provides in-depth financial information and long-term strategy
  • Shared with professional investors who have started showing meaningful interest and are close to making a decision
  • Enables investors to make a deeper evaluation and judgment
  • Typically 20–30 slides; includes more detailed information such as financial plan, market analysis, team, competitive analysis, etc.

Mission/Vision

• What is the essential value we aim to deliver?

This is essentially the company’s core identity. It’s best to express the company’s mission and vision clearly and concisely in one sentence each at the very beginning of the IR materials.

Service summary

Problem

• What market problem does the service aim to solve?
• How inconvenient/painful is this for consumers?
• Why is the problem important?
• Is there demand for solving it? Who is the target?

Solution

• Specifically, how will you solve the problem described above?
• Compared to existing approaches, what benefits do consumers and end users gain?

Investors are often not domain experts. It’s best to explain the service from a consumer’s perspective rather than a developer’s, and handle technical details separately when follow-up questions come in.

Market size

If you define market size directly in monetary terms, the result can vary significantly depending on the calculation method and variables, and it also carries a relatively higher risk of dispute. It can be safer and more effective to present market size using other indicators such as the number of potential users and the number/frequency of transactions.

• TAM (Total Addressable Market, total market): The theoretical maximum market size you could reach when offering the product or service globally, assuming an ideal scenario of achieving 100% global market share excluding all competitors
• SAM (Service Available Market, serviceable market): The realistically serviceable market within the scope the company is pursuing, considering geographic, infrastructure, and regulatory constraints
• SOM (Service Obtainable Market): The market size you can realistically capture early on within SAM, considering competition, company capabilities, and marketing strategy

When estimating market size, people often cite third-party market research for TAM or SAM and provide specific figures and metrics, while describing SOM—what actually matters immediately for a startup—in a way like: “If we achieve X% share in this market, we can reach $Y in revenue.” To be honest, when I was first preparing to start a company, my initial internal IR draft did it this way too.

The problem with this approach is that, from an investor’s perspective, it’s hard to trust a plan that claims you’ll capture some percentage of the market. You don’t automatically gain market share just because you launch, and vaguely claiming you’ll achieve X% share across all participants in that market is not very persuasive.

While showing that your TAM and SAM are sufficiently large, it’s important to present a clear logic for how you define your Immediate Market (early customer segment) and how you will expand SOM over time by sequentially targeting additional customer segments.

Business timing

• Timing matters a lot in business
• You must be able to explain to investors why this business can succeed now and why they should invest now
• You should present reasons why now is the right time to execute, such as technological feasibility, changes in people’s behavior patterns, social trends, and environmental changes

Product/Service description

• What are the key features and functions of the product/service?
• What is the concrete mechanism/how it works, and what are examples?

Business model

• How will you make money?
• Who pays? (Because the end user and the paying customer do not always coincide, you must clearly identify who actually generates revenue.)
• What will you charge for, and how will pricing work?

Competitive landscape

• Who are the major competitors?
• From the customer’s perspective, in what ways is our service/product better and what advantages do we have compared with others?
• Which services do we define as competitors, and which customers will be our primary target?

If you analyze competitors properly, you can effectively demonstrate to investors that you understand the market landscape.

Traction and go-to-market strategy

• What is the most important north-star metric for the success of the business?
  • e.g., number of orders, monthly active users (MAU), monthly transaction volume, etc.
• What traction have you achieved around that metric?
• What are the company’s main marketing methods and channels?
• What is the method and cost to acquire new customers?
• *What is customer lifetime value (LTV)?

*Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): A quantified measure of how much total profit a single user generates over the entire period they use the service

It’s better to exclude ancillary metrics that are not core KPIs.

If you’re an extremely early-stage startup with no revenue yet

• Define and present the service’s break-even point
• Do not inflate revenue-related metrics; set them realistically from a conservative viewpoint
• Present a revenue scenario for the first year of monetization, and add a revenue plan for the next several years to build confidence that you can grow steadily
  • 1-year short-term projection
  • 3-year mid-term projection
  • 5-year long-term projection
• Actively use graphs and tables so the content can be grasped at a glance
• Include hypothesis validation slides to strengthen the rationale by persuasively explaining why you set those KPIs and revenue scenarios
  • You should build solid evidence for the projected revenue scenario through repeated experiments and hypothesis validation

The Team

• Rather than introducing everyone, focus on key team members (including the CEO/founder) who play critical roles
• For experience and skills, present ~2–3 items using logos, etc., to improve readability
• If there are investors or advisors who have played (or are playing) key roles, it can be good to include them as well

Future growth plan (Milestones)

• Present goals by time period and phase
• Typically, goals are set up to the next funding stage (e.g., seed → until Series A; Series A → until Series B)
• Present the desired investment amount and the use of funds
• Rather than setting time buckets too long (e.g., half-year or more), present them in shorter increments such as ~2 months

Financials

For an IR deck, you should include financials.

• A financial plan for the next 3–5 years
• Unit economics: revenue and costs per customer unit
• Burn rate: the rate at which a startup spends cash on founding costs, R&D, and other expenses
• Total revenue and costs
• EBITDA or a cash flow statement, etc.

• Be careful not to present overly unrealistic financial plans
• Forecast revenue is often overestimated while projected costs are underestimated, so be cautious when estimating expected revenue scale
• Estimate costs as accurately as possible, considering product/service development costs as well as operating expenses

What to emphasize by funding stage

Seed

• The stage where you build an MVP, test market response, and validate the viability of the business model
• You should strongly emphasize early hypotheses and business model validation results, MVP experiment results, and the resulting revenue (if any)

Pre-A

• The stage where you must prove growth potential and secure additional capital for product development, marketing, hiring, etc.
• You need to explain what the core KPI is, how well you’re growing through what activities, and the potential for future growth

Series A

• The stage of scaling in earnest and increasing company valuation
• Since hypothesis validation should be complete by this point, you must earn investor trust with quantitative results demonstrating business performance

A few tips

• Put extra effort into the first five slides in particular to leave a positive first impression
• It can be good to repeat the mission/vision from the first slide again on the last slide
• Communicate everything in a top-down structure (lead with the conclusion)
• The object of investment is the company, so the company name takes priority over the service name even in IR materials
• Potential investors reading your IR materials may not be industry insiders, so explain using simple terms as much as possible, and add explanations when you must use jargon
• Do not mix the market problem and the solution—separate them
• Use text mainly as keywords; avoid screenshot images and improve readability with well-chosen visuals
• Provide accurate and specific figures in tables or graphs
• Be careful not to omit team introduction, desired investment amount, and the use of funds
• It’s also good to present an exit strategy for returning capital to investors
• Even if not perfect, briefly present a plan for what shareholder ownership composition/ratio will look like
• Don’t overload the main deck; if needed, split detailed materials into appendices
• Put contact information (email, phone number, name) on the last slide
• Fonts matter a lot as well—use a highly readable font such as Pretendard, and prepare a PDF to prevent rendering issues

References

KIND (Korea Investor’s Network for Disclosure)

https://kind.krx.co.kr/corpgeneral/irschedule.do?method=searchIRScheduleMain&gubun=iRMaterials

• A corporate disclosure channel operated by the Korea Exchange (KRX)
• Provides disclosure information for companies listed on KOSPI, KOSDAQ, and KONEX
• Since you can review listed companies’ IR materials, you can also check how other recently produced IR materials are typically structured