The First Pitch: It’s All About The Audience

Flavors of feedback will change, depending on who’s judging you.

It’s no surprise that when you pitch to a room full of designers, you’ll get a request for more qualitative data, like quotes and photos.

Something tells me this isn’t what a VC would be concerned with. I was expecting that we’d get serious feedback about our TAM, but we did not. I was worried we would get questioned on our traction. We did not. The one thing we got a comment on that I was expecting was our revenue model — we’re a social mission driven startup, but an advertising revenue model that generates leads from data is already in ethical dispute, which puts us in a tough position.

For pitch day, we’ll still be working on:

Storytelling

Great feedback from Kate was to be little more succinct in defining the problem, and also to add a positive brand twist. Position our product as something empowering for people. Also, I said it verbally, but I think it would help to add in clear proof that upcoming seniors are more tech savvy than ever before.

Revenue Model

Dave told us not to give up on freemium, and we aren’t. It’s something that needs further testing in the future, but I want us to present an additional revenue model for premium service features.

Content Strategy Tests

More great feedback from Kate was to acquire a board of advisors who happen to be seniors. This reminded me to keep testing our copy and messaging with seniors that have been working with us so far, and to stay close to the market.

Customer Acquisition

Google AdWords did a great job acquiring users for us previously, but we’ve been unable to keep running the ads due to some technical issues between Launchrock and the domain. We’ll get that up and running by this weekend, as well as start posting more seriously on Nextdoor.