This video explains the crucial importance of effectively showcasing your target customers within a pitch deck. Knowing your customers and demonstrating that understanding to investors is key to fundraising success and achieving product-market fit.
What this video covers
Putting the people that you’re going to go after on that pitch deck, on that document that you’re using to raise money is going to make it or break it because it’s going to help the investor determine whether or not you’ve done your homework and how well you know your customers, and knowing your customers is absolutely everything. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down for you, giving you all the insights and actionable steps to make it happen. So with that being said, let’s get into it.
The number one factor for success is listening and listening to your customers. That is going to help you understand how you can ultimately bring a solution to whatever problem that they’re experiencing and essentially hit what people call product/market fit. That is when you come up with something valuable that you can’t even keep up with the demand that you are experiencing – product and the services literally flying off the shelves.
When you’re positioning your target customers, the investor is going to want to see what kind of overlap your product or your service is having with other larger players because those larger players are going to ultimately acquire your business and give that investor a return on their investment. Is your service targeting certain customers where maybe a Google or a Facebook or an Amazon may be interested?
The use of funds is also something that goes hand-in-hand. As I have said multiple times on some of my other videos, it’s all about the flow and the structure that your pitch deck is moving along with. For example, in this case, you want to know how this is going in line with how much money you’re going to be requiring to get in front of those customers and to close them, and to get them excited about what you’re doing.
So, the use of funds, whatever amount of money that you’re going out to market and saying that you’re raising, it needs to be in sync with the amount of money that is going to cost you, as well, to get those customers to hear about you, to be excited about you, and to take action to buy your product or your service.
When it comes to actually positioning the target customers in your own pitch deck, you want to be very simple; you want to use beautiful visuals that are exactly showcasing what those types of customers look like, and maybe the other things that you want to add of additional interests or data points that you want to include in bullets and in text. So you need to have the nice balance between the text on the one end and then also the visuals. But the visuals, right away when they actually land on that slide, it needs to tell them exactly the type of customers that you’re going after.
The market slide is also going to go in sync with your target customers. You want to talk about numbers; you want to talk about the total addressable market; you want to talk about how that’s growing over the course of time, like the compounding annual growth rate that goes with that. You can find that online with a simple Google search that can help you with that. You don’t need to pay thousands of dollars for a report.
Then, the other thing is how big it is. Here, investors want to see amounts in the billions. If it’s not over a billion, then don’t do that. You’ve got to keep looking. There has to be a bigger market. You need to think big when it comes to the market because ultimately, the market is going to justify the risk of the investment, of the investors, and it’s going to also potentially limit their own investment. Investors would prefer to invest in an average team that is executing in a massive market versus investing in an incredible team that is executing in a small market because that is ultimately going to limit the potential outcome.
On the problem slide, you’re going to essentially determine what is exactly the pain that your customers are dealing with?
