Mitchell Kim is excellent generally on growth hacking tips and might have a pre order template:
From Danielle D'Agosturo of WVV Capital, Ash Rust of Sterling Road and Arun Penmetsa of Storm Ventures:
For pre-seed companies, investors will be more understanding here and take a larger bet on the team and opportunity, but for seed investors, founders will need to talk to investors that really understand that space and how sales cycles usually work. For all others, they’ll need to focus on telling a story around a repeatable model incorporating LOI or MOUs and part of that process, but that only works if they can show how those convert into paid contracts.
It’s getting harder out there to raise, but compelling stories and founder / investor is still key!
Talk about design partners or customer advisors. Focus on their level of engagement. "We have 4 design partners that we meet with weekly, they try the product and give us feedback on each iteration. 2 have told us they want to deploy within 90 days."
Ultimately, it depends on confidence that the relationship will materialize. Unfortunately, MOUs tend to fall through many times, so hard to tell unless an investor can speak with the prospect.