Investor Q&A Readiness

We are an early stage web startup, and do not have anyone with deep financial experience on our team. Is not a likely option at this point.

We are pitching to investors in a contest setting next week and want to be as prepared as possible for the Q&A, especially with regard to the financials. The format is 5 minute pitch, 5 minute Q&A. This is a precursor for us pitching to investors in a classic setting later.

What is a good list of questions we can expect from investors in order to prepare? Acronyms like COC and other jargon would also be helpful.

You didn't specify but I'll assume you don't mean financials with respect to taking on an outside investor (valuations, term sheets, etc). Instead I assume you mean the financials related to your operational business.

If I were an investor at a contest-type setting, with early-stage "companies", I would be mostly concerned with concept, execution, founding team and market size. You might get a question like "how long and much money will it take to get to milestone X?" or "how much have you spent to date?". I have sat in on a lot of angel-presentations and presented at a couple of early-stage concept forums, and never have received detailed financial questions. Any financial projections you've made at this stage are assumed by investors to be BS :)

If nothing else, you should be able to answer the basic revenue question of "how will you make money?". i.e. who is going to pay you for X/Y/Z, how much will they pay you, how often will they pay you, and why will they pay you instead of someone else? Your answers there might trigger follow-on questions about market positioning (low-cost leader, premium brand, etc). On the expense side, you should have a general idea of what fixed and variable costs you forsee and what things affect those costs.

If you can find it, check out videos from tech crunch disrupt or y combinator demo days. I think you'll find that the focus is on concept/execution/team/market and less on financials. So if you have to choose, focus on that stuff first and financials later (hey, it worked for twitter).

The best is to go there and see...

Don't expect getting investments at your first contest/pitch session, otherwise you risk to be disappointed. Prepare yourself to repeat and modify your pitch dozens of times. So listen to the investors questions, listen to the feedback, listen to the pitches of other teams/startups. Get the maximum out of it and improve, improve, improve...

These investors question during the contests are there not really for having correct answers (you will not make a investment decision after 5 minutes of Q/A) but to make you think about them - about the feasability, about the business side of your project, about the competition etc. So don't worry for the first time!