It’s fitting to wrap up this series on pitching your company by talking about the product. After all, this is DEMO.
Each year, I hear hundreds of company presentations, and a surprising majority of them gloss over the product that they are planning to bring or have brought to market. Indeed, in most investor pitch deck templates (including the one we use at Guidewire Group), the product gets one slide of seven or ten. On that slide, the product is reduced to a handful of bullet points, and maybe – but not often enough – a screen shot or photo of the product.
Instead, the company pitch focuses on slides full of data meant to show how smart the founders’ are about market size, competitive landscapes, funding requirements, and exit strategies.
Really, though, the emphasis should be reversed. In most young businesses, the company is the product. When you’re pitching your product, you’re pitching your company. It’s that simple.
A potential investor needs to fall in love with your company if he’s going to put money into the business. While they may be in the venture business to make money, investors rarely fall in love with markets or financial or even competitive advantage and exit strategies. That’s not the stuff of the passionate embrace. Products are. The product sells the company; all the rest is there to justify the love.
Your product is your best proof point of the value and the progress of your company, so show what you’ve built. Do a demo if you can, and do it early in the presentation. Let the use case you demonstrate speak to the customer need. Show the features and functions that address that need. Where appropriate, engage the listener in the demo by asking for input or, better yet, letting him drive the product.
If it’s early days and you can’t demonstrate the product, show mock screens or prototype screen shots or, in the case of hardware, a model, drawing or photograph. Be clear about what your audience is looking at and give an honest assessment of the stage of development the product is in. Investors want to know what you are going to sell and if they can see the product and – more importantly – see themselves or someone they know buying it, your halfway home.
Once you’ve demonstrated the product, use the rest of the pitch as backup. Taking that product to that big market creates a great big company that the founders are well prepared to grow into the Next Big Thing.
