The last couple weeks I’ve waxed on poetically about our pitch and if it was successful.
It appears that my underlying assumption that what what we presented was succinct and compelling was incorrect. Our pitch showed the breadth of benefits but thanks to the timeframe didn’t get very deep.
This was a major mistake. Basically my friend (who is the COO and in the pitch) mentioned that the way we presented it was super confusing and the tool makes the process look harder, not easier.
Oh shit.
We got too fixated on the big picture impacts instead of pitching it from the point of view of the end user. The fine-grained details do look harder and if we hadn’t accounted for ease of transition – it would be harder. But, we did except we never mentioned any of those things.
This feedback has been invaluable and has kicked off some major rework of our pitch deck (pulled anything that isn’t about our initial target audience and diving into benefits / mitigations) and we’re building a prototype to be able to show ease of use since some of the core features that will make the system super easy to use aren’t built yet.
We’re gearing up for fundraising and socializing the product with our initial target market in March so we have plenty of time to pull together a new pitch … maybe this time we’ll actually show how we solve problems … time will tell.