Question: Pitch Deck & Funding vs. Prototype vs. MVP Product
Hey guys,
I'm a first time tinkerer and entrepreneur beginning my journey in trying to build a company. Given that I'm heavily in the ideating phase of the product with my partner - I'm curious if anyone has any tips on a good strategy for this phase. We know the space and general problem area we are trying to address but non of the solutions make intuitive sense at the moment.
Specifically, is the best approach to refine a pitch deck with a rough product idea and get angel funding or a small investment (given that most ideas pivot anyway after this phase). Or would you suggest building out a quick prototype and/or MVP - the challenge here of course is the lost time spent trying to build the product myself.
Thanks!
Your knowledge of the space and access to customers is much more valuable than any amount of venture capital.
If you're truly familiar with this space then you have a huge advantage - personal knowledge of potential customers. Your best bet is to talk with people who are using those unintuitive solutions you mention and figure out what their pain points are, and using that knowledge to start selling your solution to them(there is a very fluid path from problem-definition to solution-selling).
At this stage VCs want to see a good problem, solved by a good team, with good traction. Unless you have a really stellar team with past fundraising experience, putting together a pitch is probably a distraction at this point. But if there are any accelerators coming up that you're interested in then it might be worth throwing together an application.
Thanks Yoshiki! Any idea if accelerators care about having a product or are they literally just looking at the entrepreneurs backgrounds and general idea? Any tips for that?
I think the majority value the team and their background most. Many very explicitly say that it's fine to apply without a product or traction. So you can really apply at any stage in your journey.
Hey Zaid, i presume you're not based in Australia :) If you were i could have helped you more directly. On the basis of my experience and the work with VCs i've done, the less you can do that requires rework the better. Rework = resource drain. so its generally better to convey vision with a quick (even dumb) prototype or animation done on Illustrator or Sketch or Invision or webflow.com etc. as @pmox2018 says, once you get proof of interest, its easier. validation is the starting point and may make it easier to get pre seed funding.
A full working prototype/MVP is great if you've got the resources/runway to keep going past that but only after validation. Trust me - i really goofed this one up:)
From a VC's perspective, if you've got something in-market then they want fast/big numbers, performance etc which is usually under whelming at the larval stage. so it often works better to not have something in market, but something that can be demoed and which can inspire enthusiasm about what it could be, and what the team is going to make it. That way the focus stays on the vision, the passion, the team. If you want, I can connect you with a fantastic team here in Melbourne - they're called pitchblak.co. they're really founder-empathetic.
Awesome! Thanks for the tips Zubin! This was generally where our head was but the issue is building a crappy looking set of screenshots in a deck just didn't feel like it did justice, but on the other hand building the product itself would simply take too much time or cost too much. I think we are gonna try and see if we can pitch to angels/accelerators and see if we are in the right direction.
Maybe you're already doing this, but i would suggest getting expressions of interest from a core (small) group of target users, and then using that in your chat with the angels. they will be a lot more angelic then.
Hi,
Before you get into the MVP stage, you need to validate that your idea has some traction. Stand up a website, buy some traffic with facebook ads, collect some emails from interested customers, survey your customers about what most interests them about your product, and then start refining your idea based on customer feedback. You actually have a long way to go before you should talk about building anything. Validation comes first, then prototype, then MVP, then beta, then version 1.0. You can do the validation for less than $100. Validation is always where you should start.
Hope this is helpful to you in some way.
-Pmox2018
Thanks Pmox2018 this is really helpful advice. I think our challenge is knowing what our customer wants before 1) knowing who they are going to be exactly and 2) what they want before they can articulate. Think about the smartphone or computer before anyone really had one or was part of the average consumer's daily life. I think this is our challenge - so figuring who to target with an adwords campaign is an open question...
Hi,
I'm a product manager in my day job - happy to give some more advice if you want to give some additional details about your product/service.
Cheers!
-Pmox2018