Investor vs Customer Pitch

If there is one thing, I have learnt in the past few weeks, it’s the fact that there is a long way to go from having a great idea to pitching that great idea to people. The approach you would take, pitching that idea to an investor is quite different from the one you would take pitching that idea to potential users. These two demographics all require a different sort of information in order to buy into your vision and here’s why I think so.

In coming up with a prototype for our dragon’s den presentation, the team spent a lot of time talking to people in care homes, spending time with adults over the age of 75 who live alone as well as a few other people in order to understand if we;

1. Were targetting the right group of people
2. Properly understood how people would use the product
3. Could come up with the right content for it.

Within a few days, we felt we had an understanding of what the end product should look like; we proceeded to prepare our pitch. In preparing our pitch we wanted to show that we understood what the problems were from the customer point of view, we knew what channels to promote the product through. We also did an analysis of our direct and indirect competitors and highlighted our unfair advantage (thanks to our module director for constantly emphasizing this).

Our goal was to ensure that the judges first understood that there was a problem and that the problem was big enough to make a business out of. We spent time doing some research and coming up with the right numbers and in summary, we nailed our pitch! We sounded great and we were all happy and it was time to print the real product and come up with more content for the journal.

We once again sought the help of representatives of our target market and in sharing our idea with them, it dawned on me that the investor pitch angle was not working. They were not so interested in all the numbers we had been able to cram by now. They were asking questions like “how did you come about this idea?” “Did you have something similar growing up?” “My granddaughter likes to paint, is there something in it for her?” They were concerned about what could happen if a liquid spilled on it (we had not even taken that into consideration). These questions pointed to one thing, value!

They knew about the problem much more than we did, so figures were out of the conversation; there was more interest in the nitty gritty bits of the product simply because they wanted to be certain our product was addressing their need. So, what is the way forward, as entrepreneurs, do we refine our pitch to cater to both investors and customers? Like a one size fits all?  Michael Seibel who is the CEO and a Partner at YC proposes having two separate pitches because both groups want different things. The investors want to know if you can build a successful business out of your idea while the customer just wants to be certain that your product can solve their problems.