When you design your product you have a vision on what it is and how you will get it on the market. As development proceeds you need to make minor changes or sometimes bigger corrections but your vision generally stays the same. 

However when you meet with investors you often have to review your vision. Your approach may have too little perspectives on monetisation or you are not really solving a problem. Either way it calls for redesigning the concept and the vision or simply discarding it. But if you are lucky it is just your pitch that is simply not giving a clear enough picture. Then you seemingly have nothing that would convince an investor to risk his money on but maybe you are just not making a clear picture.

Because of this it is crucial to get feedback from professionals before you throw yourself to the lions. You may think you understand your product better than anyone else, but as the creator you may no longer grasp the simple approach of the listener. When I presented my last version of my pitch to an investor a few weeks back he listened carefully for more than two hours. It was a friendly and patient man with a lot of venture capital experience as it turned out. But his background was simple engineering as he called it. 

“Vision is not about how you launch your product. It is about how the market is going to prove you right.”

After going through the whole process he gave me a few lines of advise. Advise that I read before on websites and heard in speeches but I guess I was stuck in my own point of view and never understood what it really meant. The bottom line was “make it simple to understand”, no matter how complex your product is. And finally realising that lead me to a new pitch where the path for launching my product became abundantly clear. No it is not the path i had planned but more important it leaves the door open for the user to prove the point that I have been trying to make in each of my previous pitches but which I didn’t need to make. Vision is not about how you launch your product. It is about how the market is going to prove you right.

But before we get to that hurdle there is still user testing which will surely teach us a lot. Being able to face criticism in the first place…

Note : The investor I talked to did like the product. Upon request I wrote him a much better pitch which he currently uses to introduce my product to other potential investors in his country.