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Nailing Your Solution
The biggest mistake most founders make with their solution slide is using it to promote features and not a solution.
The solution needs to relate directly to the problem. It needs to specifically ease the pinpoint that you have identified. Often, founders who have worked on a product for a long period and developed new features tend to use the solution slide to promote their core features + their most recent features. The problem is that you are pitching the solution based on your lived experience building it. You are pitching the parts of the product that you are most proud of or connected to at that moment. This is not what investors need to hear.
Investors need to hear how exactly you are solving a problem. If you push features you can end up taking an incredible solution which could be pitched as a painkiller and instead making it come across as a vitamin by highlighting the “nice to have” features instead of focusing specifically on the “painkilling” features.
Startup PromoTix ($48M in traction) is saving the events industry
PromoTix is solving the event industry’s challenges around high ticket fees and low attendance. Ticketmaster and competitors charge up to 40% of the ticket price to book, deterring guests who can’t afford the added cost. Combined with a crowded marketing space, events struggle.
PromoTix is raising funds to expand. Already profitable, with 656k users and $48M in sales in its first 30 months, PromoTix has low-fee and no-fee SaaS pricing, as well as patented marketing tools that drive attendance.
How to improve your solution slide:
Mirror your problem slide - The easiest way to avoid having a solution slide that doesn’t connect with your audience is to ensure that it perfectly mirrors your problem slide. I highly recommend that you duplicate your problem slide and replace each problem with its solution and that forms your solution slide. This type of mirroring makes it visually clear how you are solving problems while ensuring that you keep your content focused on solutions over features.
Use the rule of threes - I’d highly recommend that you have three focused problems and three solutions. The rule of threes is very powerful for helping lists stick with an audience. Even the iPhone pitch relied on the rule of threes (an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator), I still can’t think of that without hearing Steve Jobs voice saying it.
Capping your into - The solution slide should be seen as the cap to your introductory slides. Your perspective framer, problem and solution are the “introductory” slides that really tell the crux of your story; after that, you are really padding out the reasons to invest and building the layers of the narrative, but this is the end of that initial story.
Do you have a strong solution slide? |
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