Why do customers pay you?

In order for an investor to believe in your business, they have to believe that people should buy the thing you sell.

To you, the value might be obvious. But unless your investor is also your target customer, it’s almost definitely not obvious to them.

But we can make it obvious by nailing 3 things in the deck.

1. Describing the right problem

In most cases, describing general economic or global problems is NOT the right place to start. If you sell a product to a customer, describing anything besides that customer’s specific problem does nothing for your narrative.

Get into all the extra time and money your target customer is spending right now because they don’t have your product yet.

Then once you’ve driven that home, you can speak a bit to the macro context if it is relevant to the investor you’re talking to.

2. Including an ROI slide

If your problem and solution slides don’t clearly lay out the time and money you save customers, you can add another slide to show it.

I’d call this an ROI slide, and I usually lay it out in three columns.

Example:

If you don’t have good numbers or data to use here, you can absolutely use reasonable estimates. In fact, investors fully expect you to.

The goal is to show such big value that even if your numbers are a bit off, your product would still be worth the investment.

3. Laying out traction early

If people already pay, you’d want investors to know that before ANYTHING else. Don’t “build up” to traction. Use an intro slide to put it front and center. I wrote specifics on this here.

Good luck with your raise and watch out for next weekend’s email!

Best,

Nathan