Don't have traction or a product yet? Here's what you can show investors

I’m CEO and co-founder of Rupt — AI that finds you better stocks. We launched our startup last month, and it's been gaining some traction. But when we were first starting out, it wasn't easy. I faced the challenge of what to show potential investors when you have no real product, no revenue, and no users.

I've collected some of my thoughts below, and I'd appreciate your help in fleshing them out further by leaving your own examples in the comments section. I hope it would be useful for other founders just starting out with only a team and an idea.

Customer Acquisition Cost
CAC is one of the biggest challenges startups face. That’s why we decided to calculate it first.
When you don’t have a product or traction, it can be hard to measure CAC through the entire funnel. But you can start with the cost of acquiring leads. Luckily, we started collecting lead data even before we had a product. We made a simple landing page and launched ads on Google, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to get people to sign up for our waitlist. We identified channels that were most effective and cut those that didn’t bring in results. In our pitch deck, we show the CAC calculation and clearly indicate where the actual data is and where the assumptions are made.
The cost of a lead (especially at the beginning when the algorithm is not yet optimized) is in the range of $5–10. Accordingly, you won’t be able to get any meaningful lead cost data for less than $500. It also makes sense to check what channels are often recommended for your industry. But never go there because everyone is already there and it will be expensive.

Free Customer Acquisition Channels
Investors are well aware that the high cost of acquisition can kill a business, so it’s important to have some free channels for acquiring customers. If you have such channels, showcase them! This could be a blog or Instagram account of founders, a corporate blog of a startup, or a unique attraction mechanic with a viral effect.
We made an Instagram account at the idea stage, started publishing useful content, and promoted these posts. This is how the first subscribers and organic leads appeared, which allowed us to slightly reduce our customer acquisition costs. The presence of organic traffic also indicated that the idea was catching on with customers.

Market Size
Even a mediocre product that fills a real need in a quickly growing market has a chance of success. We’re building a stock analysis app that helps casual investors make smarter stock picks without having to spend hours researching the market daily. In our pitch deck, we show that the number of individual investors in the US has doubled over the past year, but 80% of them lose money over a 1–2 year horizon. This makes it easier to prove that the problem of stock analysis and stock selection is relevant for a large number of individual investors, and not just for us and our friends.

Team
You need to demonstrate that you have a team of experts with the skills, knowledge, and experience needed to successfully launch this product. But not only that. If the founders and the startup idea can bring together a few smart people who are ready to invest their valuable time, this is a good signal for investors.

Founders’ Reputation
I want to underline the reputation of the founders because it can be different from the team experience. It’s important to show that founders have past achievements, even if they don’t relate directly to the industry in which they are currently working. It’s more about their ability to achieve goals, work under stressful conditions, keep a cool head, and overcome failures.

Product Roadmap
A product roadmap is a tool that shows “internal” traction and can be used to sell the vision. A product roadmap helps investors understand whether you meet your deadlines, whether you can be trusted to plan and manage a project, and whether you have a clear vision of the future. You need to be able to demonstrate that you have a clear understanding of where you’ll take your company in the next 6 months and the next 2 years.
In our pitch deck, you can see how quickly we’ve tested our idea, how we got a team together, when we registered a company, when we launched an MVP, and how we move towards our goals.