Iman Abuzeid says marketplace founders need a solution ten times better than existing ones, not just a nicer design. Your first 5-10 hires make or break you. When fundraising, pitch lower-tier investors first, lead with customer problems, and end with unit economics.
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Yeah. My top advice. Number one is to make sure the ideation is, the process has been done thoroughly and that you really have a unique insight. So whatever you've come up with is at least 10 times better than the status quo and what's already out there. Better being defined as faster, cheaper, more compliant. You know, if it's, if all it is is just like, hey, the design is nicer, then that's not good enough, you know? Really, it has to be like a fundamental change to what's already happening out there. The second is for, on the topic of, the second is just pay attention to your team and who you hire. At the end of the day, like the first, your first 5, 10 people, I mean, they set the trajectory for the entire company. So make sure that you got the right people, right? And then, and if you don't, replace them. So, you know, part of that is like, you have to have courage, right? As CEO to make decisions like, hey, we need to pivot. We need to scrap this idea. This experiment has failed 7 times. We need to move on. this person is not working out. We need to replace them. Like, you need quite a lot of courage to run a high-growth company successfully. And then the third piece is on fundraising. I mean, I know it's in a very different fundraising environment today than it was when I was fundraising or when I started. That just requires an enormous amount of relentless, you have to be very relentless and then just have extremely strong process and content. Process meaning like you're targeting the right people, you're sequencing it in the right way. Like don't rush to pitch a tier 1 investor if you're still not very good, right? Like practice on the tier 3 investors first, right? And leave the tier 1s to the end of your process. And then on content, I mean, I review a lot of decks and probably the most common issues I see in decks It doesn't sound very ambitious in the beginning. It doesn't explain the customer problem upfront. No, you know, you're taking the investor on a hero's journey at the end of the day. And so there's a certain story arc that you need to follow and things like unit economics and your go-to-market strategy and all that, all that stuff is at the end, right? And so yeah, following a certain story arc. Uh, is, is pretty important there. So that, that's, you know, those are, would probably be my top tips.
