

Ask HN: What to focus on when pitching, product or underlying platform? - BerislavLopac

(Note: This is my second try, rephrased and hopefully clearer, with a question I posted a few days back.)<p>I'm working on launching a startup based on a new computing platform developed by my co-founders. The platform itself is very powerful and flexible, and we envision it being used as a foundation for various different products and services, but we have decided to start with one product which is relatively simple to develop while having potential appeal to a wide range of end-users.<p>So, I'm really curious of the HN's opinion, what would make more sense to focus on when pitching to potential investors? On one hand the platform is where the power lies, but it might not be too obvious at once, especially to a non-technical listeners; on the other hand, it might be too easy to get lost in the specific aspects of this specific product. So, should we focus on pitching one, the other, or both simultaneously? Or perhaps we should prepare two sets of presentations, depending on who we're pitching to?<p>To make things clearer, let's just say that the product itself is nothing particularly innovative except for its platform; something like Google Docs when compared to MS Office.
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lrm242
I've built a platform company in the past, and it's probably one of the harder
startup genres to master. One of the problems is its _very_ hard to impress
upon your listener how cool your platform really is. Even with fancy demos, we
never felt pitching our platform was received as well as it should--the
listener simply doesn't appreciate the work that goes into the foundation.

Investors will take the time to try to understand if you can get them hooked
on the market opportunity. Unfortunately, its typically hard to convince them
that your platform, even though its very cool & innovative, can overcome the
intrinsic inertia people have in adopting new tools.

Personally, I would be focusing on the applications you can build with the
platform. That's what we ended up doing at Metreos
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metreos>). Our pitches contained 10% platform
and 90% real world application examples.

Every company is different so please take this with the requisite grain of
salt. Good luck!

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dirtyaura
My take on this (we have a bit similar situation) is that you pitch one long-
term vision that you believe in. In your case, it sounds it is the platform,
and the first product is a step that takes you towards that vision.

When you are unsure about your long term vision (which it sounds that you are)
you can also learn a lot for your thinking by pitching different versions to
different people.

