You’ve been given a billion pieces of advice on how to present to VCs and other possible investors. My thing has been problem, solution, who is going to pay for it. I’ve also said that if you’ve got the demo, get to it as soon as you can.
I want to add one more tip/insight which resonates well with the money crowd as well as potential partners, suppliers, and your development team. Use Cases. A use case is simply a non-geek speak narrative of how a particular person uses your product or service. This might seem obvious but you’d be surprised how many people stutter and stammer when they have to explain who is going to use/pay for the product.
A good example is the really cool product Dave Sifry put together called Offbeat Guides. When Dave first told me about this product, he had his pitch deck (10 slides, just so you know) but before we really dived into it, he started off with the one liner (personalized travel guides with real time information throughout the guide) and then dived into his use cases. He described a family, a single person, a business traveler, a sports junkie looking to hit all the events in one town, etc, etc. In each one, he laid out exactly how the product was going to work within the use case. Plus he had the benefit of giving his development team a very detailed idea of what he was expecting his users to do, why and under what conditions. This gave the dev team context and something to measure against as they build something. Again, it sounds simple and obvious but it is a very powerful way to work effectively with your technical team.
I bring this up because over the last two weeks (time flies), I’ve been both pitching my company using this technique as well as I’ve been asked to give feedback/opinions on opportunities for some VC friends of mine.
For those who were pitching with solid use cases, the conversations were engaging and the entrepreneur was able to keep ahead of questions/comments like “I don’t get it, who is going to use this”. Use cases show you understand the value proposition and how your product or service fits.
It’s worth your time, in my view, to document and know cold your use cases.
Back to my legal documents.
While I liked his product and his blog I actually would have preferred to see his use case slides. After your praise of how well done they were I'm eager to view them. Especially since I am currently doing some use cases for a client that are drier than sand.
Posted by: Mike Drips | July 23, 2009 at 10:28
Use Cases are one of those tools that really help focus a product. If you have good use case coverage you are able to use them as a sanity check for features, sure you may have a great idea for a new feature but if you can't map it back to one of your core use cases you're just adding scope creep to your project.
The amount of useful information you can derive from Use Cases is staggering. I would recommend that you have a look at one of the many processes from taking your use cases and translating them directly into code.
One of the more stripped down startup-y ones that I like is the ICONIX process. Even if you never personally write a line of code, understanding how a good software engineer can take your business use cases and quickly flesh out a working system that doesn't miss anything important (you put all the important app interactions in your use cases right?) is invaluable.
Best of luck,
Alan
Posted by: Alan Hietala | July 23, 2009 at 11:19
Rick, good points for sure. let me know when you're out in SF
Posted by: Josh Steinitz | July 27, 2009 at 20:11