Founders, here's why investors are ghosting your pitch deck. Either their objections are valid, or you need to fix your pitch deck to better communicate your story.
Problem 1: You're targeting investors who will never invest in your startup.
Do your homework. Understand their investment thesis (geos, sectors, stages, check sizes, etc.) and make sure you match.
A shotgun spray-and-pray approach to investor outreach rarely works. Be a sniper. Make every bullet count.
Problem 2: You're targeting the right investors, but there is a deal-killing issue with you or your pitch deck:
- They think your market is too small to generate a market leader exit of the size they need to meet their fund's return objectives.
- They think your product is not good enough to become the market leader.
- They think your team lacks the relevant experience to turn your idea into a market-leading product, and your product into a market-leading business.
- They are underwhelmed by your traction to date. If you're pre-product, not enough problem-solution validation. If you're pre-revenue, weak progress on MVP development. If you're post-revenue, weak PMF and/or no scalable GTM motion for customer acquisition and retention.
That's it. Everything else is secondary.
All investors are looking for is a startup with the product and team potential to dominate a large, growing market.
Like Uber, AirBnB, Stripe, etc.
Convince them that you have this market, product, and team trifecta and you'll get conversations.
Fail, and you won't.
How to apply these insights
- Target only those investors who are willing and able to invest in your startup if they like your story.
- Prove that your market is big enough to generate a market leader exit of the size they need to meet their fund's return objectives. Make sure you know how to prove your market is "big enough" for each target investor based on the size of their fund. If this doesn't make sense to you, Google "vc fund returner math."
- Prove that your product is good enough to become the market leader. Explain your compelling and enduring advantages over current and potential competitors.
- Explain why your team has the relevant experience to turn your idea into a market-leading product and a market-leading business — and how you plan to do so.
- Provide traction data to prove that you are a runaway freight train on a one-way track to market dominance.
If this sounds too vague to you...
Then you're missing the forest for the trees.
It's pointless trying to fine-tune a pitch deck that doesn't proactively address the 4 gating objections that kill most pitch decks: weak market, weak product, weak team, weak traction.
Originally published on LinkedIn