This video explains how to effectively present your competitor landscape within a pitch deck. It emphasizes that acknowledging competition is crucial for investors, contrary to claiming to be the first in a market.
What this video covers
Displaying your landscape – the competitors, whether that is directly or indirectly, is a critical part of being able to raise money, showcasing, and putting your pitch deck in the best light possible toward investors. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down and walking you step-by-step through how to put that landscape in motion. With that being said, let’s get into it.
Who is your competition? At the end of the day, just like Mark Cuban says, there are at least 100 other people that have thought about your idea either directly or indirectly. So, you’re not the first one. Everything, for the most part, has been invented. Now, obviously, you can make it better; you can make it faster, but, for the most part, everything is out there.
Now, it is a big turnoff for investors when you literally tell them, “We are the first ones to do this. There is no one that is competing with us.” This is the kind of stuff that really sounds the alarm for the investors. They’re going to run in the other direction if you do this.
What you want to do is you want to do the research. You want to go online. You want to go on Google. You want to ask people. You want to have those right conversations. You want to try to go to websites like Crunchbase, PitchBook, Mattermark to see who is competing in your own segment. Who is the closest one? And try to dig in as much information as possible because the more that you know, the better you’re going to be.
You should also look at potential future competitors because the truth of the matter is, is that when you’re about to launch a business or you’re already executing on a business, the way that you should always go about it is always: think big, but start small, which is essentially building a store into a mall rather than the other way around.
As part of the work that you’re going to be doing on researching those competitors is also knowing how much capital they have raised, meaning that you need to do your research and know at the same cycle that you’re in your business in this lifecycle of your business now. How much did they raise? At what valuation did they raise the money?
As part of the research on the competitive landscape, you also need to take a look at who are the potential players that may be interested in acquiring your business? Typically, you can even put a slide at the end of the deck that talks about this.
But here’s the thing: by identifying those potential players that can come in and offer you an acquisition, this is going to help the investor because in many cases, the investor is going to ask you: what is the potential exit? How am I going to be able to get my investment back with some returns?
When it comes down to the competitive landscape slide, this is a very important slide, and people complicate this slide too much. You need to simplify it, and you need to make it clear for whoever is reviewing it. The way that you want to go about it is by putting a diagram where you’re putting all the different players. You put the Y-axis and the X-axis.
Essentially, you’re putting the two labels – Y-axis and X-axis. They need to be your strengths that play to everyone else’s weaknesses. That could be something around your technology. It could be something around your distribution or whatever that is.
Now, never try to avoid putting people in that slide. Maybe you are concerned about how it will look. Here’s the thing: if you don’t put everyone there on that slide that you should be putting, the investor is going to think that you’re either withholding information, that you’re lying, or that you have no idea about your own sector.
