The Penultimate Week

Last week we set a goal to acquire more customers and getting feedback/experimenting. We were able to achieve those, acquiring 36 more customers, and also got feedback on our revenue model. We were finally able to validate our ideas and felt much better & less uncertain, yayyy

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What is missing in your pitch? What can investors trip you up on? What is your plan for that?

I woke up this morning at 8:30 am with anxiety because I felt my team wasn’t ready for our practice pitch. My teammates were anxious too as we were texting each other furiously on when we’re meeting and what we’re doing before 12. Once we met up at school, we were all over the place: duplicate slides, irrelevant old slides, no internet connection, slow computers, running out of battery, the list goes on… but we were able to pull through and present today, and things went surprisingly pretty ok.

Our Revenue Model

This totals to $54,440/month

Prior to this morning we were missing our revenue, which we were able to pull together but still have to work on. We have a sliding scale freemium model, and I’m not completely sure of how we should calculate or get an “average” revenue because we don’t know how big an “average” neighbor group would be. Would people try to stay within 1–5 units because it’s free? Would people grow to 31+unit huge groups to pay $3/month? I wonder how we can research or test this. I can see this calculation being something investors might trip us on, so it’s definitely a priority.

We’ve also struggled a little with explaining our “recruitment period” idea (a new idea that came up from revenue model experimenting in the weekend) but we’re not sure if we should include it in the pitch deck or not. It goes like this:

What we found over the weekend is that customers are in need of tools and motivation to help them recruit their neighbors. A customer we talked to was a bit hesitant about inviting more than 5 units because suddenly she had to go from paying $0 to $10. She wanted some kind of transition/trial period, and that’s how we decided that customers get billed at the end of the month, so they have that time to recruit as many people to get out of the $10 zone. I feel this is a pretty important part of the BuildingBlocks experience, but maybe it’s a detail that isn’t important in pitching to investors. We’ll ask Christina on Wednesday!

Some other teams, as well as example pitch decks online, show screenshots of what the product looks like or how the product works. Are we missing that? Are they essential for us, or have we communicated the idea effectively enough? Those are some questions we need to answer as well.

I think we have a pretty strong story and vision (we got good feedback on that) but I want to make sure that nervousness and language barrier doesn’t get in my way of telling it successfully. We need to rehearse more and team pl8s is definitely aware of that and we will definitely rehearse more.

We also want to work on communicating the #s and $s without getting too complicated and losing the momentum we have from the story.

To conclude, our plan for the week is to rehearse more to find gaps and holes in our pitch, which I sense is mostly in the # and $ sections. Practice pitching today made me truly realize that anxiety and excitement are different sides of the same coin; we’ve finally flipped ours to the excitement side.

Thank you for reading!