Seed Stage Pitch

I pitched a VC I know well today. They are a Series A investor, so I knew I had a few hurdles to overcome. I pitched two things in the meeting: 1. our hypothesis about why there is an opportunity and 2. our approach to uncovering the problem and creating a solution.

I organized the deck much differently than I have in the past. A typical pitch, mentions the solution upfront, soon after the problem/opportunity. But I realized that as a seed stage investment, what I was really pitching was the process of using outcome-driven research to define our solution.

The benefit of outcome-driven research is that it quantifies what an unmet customer need is (what the problem is) in a very specific, measurable and actionable way. So it dawned on me during the meeting - shouldn't every portfolio company be able to quantify its customers' unmet needs? Even portfolio companies that have a shipping product should go through this process, unless the product is a runaway success. In most cases the product is probably failing or at least not meeting expectations, and the company is basically running down a series of "blind alleys" until they find light at the end of one.

I realized that most venture-backed companies really iterate the "fuzzy front end" of the product development process, when what they should be doing is taking the "fuzzy" out of the front end altogether - at the seed stage, the early stage and the late stage.