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Nailing your Why Now
Most founders completely forget about the why now slide in their deck, but it’s actually a key part of the pitch.
When you are pitching a potential $1B+ company, it’s natural that investors will be skeptical. The primary questions that many will ask are (i) Why hasn’t this been done before, (ii) Why is this the right time?
The reality is that getting investors to give you money isn’t just about having the best product, problem or solution, but it’s about having the right timing. Studies of startup success show that market entry timing is the #1 indicator of startup success.
The key to convincing investors of this is to clearly explain why this idea hasn’t been acted on in the past and why they can’t wait (and collect more data) before investing in the future.
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There is only one real way to nail your Why Now slide and that is to show how the opportunity that exists today didn’t exist in the past and won’t exist in the future because of trends and forces outside of anyone control. This means those forces must be:
Demographic
Societal
Political
Legal
Technological
Environmental
Economic
These types of forces and trends that nobody alone can control shifting can create short windows of opportunity. For example, DropBox could exist because of technological advancements in cloud computing and the social adoption of computers. For a short period, there were lots of people with computers but no way of digitally storing files other than on hard drives. A year earlier the technology and market didn’t exist, a year later it was so obvious that numerous companies offered competing services, a few years later it was a free offering by Google and others as a loss leader. The window was small but Dropbox capitalized.
Do you have a why now slide? |
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