The IPO Playbook: Evidence, Agility, and Investor Trust | David Iannetta

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00:00 The IPO Playbook
02:30 Being Unprepared for IPO
04:30 Data & Market Validation
06:05 FDA Changes in 2025
09:27 Tips for Creating an IPO Deck
13:23 Messaging for IPO

About this episode: Early funding rounds reward vision, but the IPO process rewards verification. David joins me again to walk through the journey from institutional capital to public offering and shows how every assumption that once lived in a slide note must now survive legal discovery. He recalls deals that stalled because total-addressable-market figures lacked primary sources and others that crumbled when an FDA setback forced a last-minute pivot the team could not explain. His core message: a marketer’s real job at this level is to translate complex clinical value into a dollar-based opportunity that bankers can model and retail investors can grasp in two sentences.

Three IPO Musts:
1. Treat market sizing the way a biostatistician treats a primary endpoint. Start with bottom-up data such as procedure volumes from CMS, epidemiology registries, or detailed purchase-order pulls from group-purchasing organizations. Build the model cell by cell so any analyst can trace volume, price, and adoption-rate assumptions back to a public document or a signed customer quote. Keep totals in three buckets—total addressable market, serviceable market, and realistically obtainable share—so you are never accused of using a single inflated figure. A grounded model not only survives diligence but also shapes banker sentiment; if you claim a four-billion-dollar market and the underwriters later pin it at one, you can lose half your valuation before the first road-show slide appears.

2. Create a living archive for every assumption that feeds your financials. Store PDFs of journal articles, invoices that justify cost inputs, raw spreadsheets, and even audio transcripts of expert interviews in a well-indexed data room. Each time a figure changes—perhaps because new coding data arrive or the FDA requests a larger trial—update the archive and note the version in your working deck. Bankers, lawyers, and syndicate analysts will audit each cell in your spreadsheet against its original source; if you have to scramble for proof after the S-1 is filed you will burn weeks, pay extra legal fees, and lose the momentum that makes an IPO window attractive in the first place.

3. Build your narrative as a living document that flexes with every regulatory update or clinical read-out. Investors do not punish a company for hitting a speed bump; they punish it for ignoring the bump or pretending it did not happen. Hold regular “story scrubs” where marketing, clinical, and finance teams rewrite the pitch deck in light of the latest data, resize the market if endpoints shift, and script a clear path forward. Practicing this iterative storytelling prevents the deer-in-the-headlights moment when a diligence call surfaces new questions and shows investors that the team can navigate uncertainty as confidently as it develops science.

For more specialized help with growth, check out my firm, Mesh.
https://meshagency.com/

#IPOReady #LifeScienceMarketing #MarketSizing