Startup Istanbul Course - Ozan Sönmez - Founding Partner in YellowX

The reason is I love Star wars, not because I'm just a geek, but it has really good startup advice and especially on storytelling. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Ozan. I lived abroad for the last six years and I trained a lot of startups. Currently I'm mentoring, training in Stanford, Berkeley and MITF programs that are happening globally. Some of them, of course, not virtually. I'll be very happy to kind of guide you towards this. I'm super late in answering emails. I'm really quick in answering or putting some responses on Twitter. So if you have anything to ask me directly, you can ask me on Twitter. I'll be fine with answering those if you have it. So this part is maybe a good question Joerg has why is this important? Why is storytelling important? I'm going to be covering a lot of topics at this session, but most important I'm going to be telling you why you should focus on storytelling. Usually when you are in physical contact with people, you can express your energy, you can express your anger, you can express your happiness, you can press and communicate your passion, especially on what you're working on. But it's really difficult, or at least a little bit more difficult when you're doing this online. So I really would like you to focus on storytelling in your pitches and I'll give you a few examples of how you can do this. So the only thing I need from you to do is is focus on how you're going to build hope. You need to communicate hope. You need to create hope. You need to catalyze hope from the investor's perspective. This presentation is guided towards persuading people to invest in you and not only invest in you financially, but also invest in you as a person. You have to understand the power of storytelling to convince other co founders to come and help you convince customers to buy from you. So you need storytelling not only to fundraise, but also to get the resources so funding, people, revenue. Those three resources need you to be really good at storytelling, and hope is the key element in that storytelling. You have to be a storyteller because your pitch will be nothing else but a jumbled scribble coming from Egypt or from Mars thousands years ago or thousands years from if you don't communicate this hope, if you don't communicate really well, we don't really care what you write on the presentation. The first thing we really look at as investors I do invest myself is the passion you need to communicate and that passion that connects to the story. So Your job is to find the connection, stimulate my interest and my intellectual curiosity, and visualize as well what will happen if I choose to walk with you as an investor or as a professional? What will happen as a customer as well? You need to be able to tell me what you are going to be doing for me, with me. And that is important. Otherwise I'm not going to believe in you. I don't believe in numbers. I don't believe in big market sizes. I believe in the founder's ability. And in order for that to happen, I need to see this fits. There are three fits. Problem solution fit the solution, team fit, and product market fit. Do you understand the problem? Can you build the solution and does that match? Is the team you have built able to create that solution, execute the technology, build the product, launch the whatever you're launching, build the hardware. Do you have everything it needs to happen? And then the next phase, probably some of you are struggling with this is how fast can you scale when you have that product market fit? When you see that the market is really taking the product out of you and you're able to promote and execute all this operation. This is a very American thing. Not always I have seen not work sometimes. But it is an important concept to know. It is a high concept pitch. This may not be necessarily a part of your pitch, but if it is, it helps. It needs to tell me how you're connecting different attitudes, different technologies and different markets. So I'll give you an example. This works. Yes. So healthcare with an app. So you're combining a traditional market with a new technology. So if you're doing healthcare with an app, you can mention we are doctors on YouTube. So at that point I will immediately understand what you're trying to do. Or you can say, we're selling books on the Internet, this is Amazon, but you can say we are the Amazon of X. Amazon in India, we're selling X. As Amazon did this software, Taxi on Demand. Everybody knows Taxi on Demand. This is Uber you can mention. Oh, we're like Uber but with motorcycles. So people will familiarize themselves with you if you tell them something that they already know, they already have an understanding of. You don't need to be very complex and it does not have to be 100% whatever you're doing. But it just needs to tell me the area of which you're blending things. So I will have and a good estimation of what I should be expecting to hear from you. So this is part of your high concept pitch, something that you'll tell me in five little words, I will know which domain you're working in and that will make my job very easy. Then I'll have my gears turning to understand you much better. Again, I can't stop explaining how important this is. You are. By the way, I have a really nice typo there, which is a good example of what you should not be doing. You should be creating hope because you are nobody. Your startup is nothing. You are in a godforsaken land without funding, you don't even have the product yet. All you have is your passion. And you need to convince me that of all the other big players in the market. And by the way, hope is something that I have engraved on myself. So this is also how important I take that you need to be able to tell me why you will be able to beat the incumbents, why you will be able to create a new technology, why that is really important. And your odds of success are really low. Your startup. And I need to understand how much of that is wishful thinking and how much of that is strategic hope, strategically designed plans. If you don't communicate that to me, of course I'm not going to invest in you, I'm not going to do anything with you because you don't have any chance of survival against all those large companies, whether they are larger startups or large holding companies. So I'll tell you two very basic frameworks that will be helpful. One starts by bringing the future to the present and the other is bringing the past to the future. So what I mean by that, if you start your conversation by saying, hey, my name is Ozam and 10 years ago when I was doing this, I had that problem and I was not the only one. I had millions of people suffering through that. Now we built the solution to make that go away. We made the world better by working hard. So that's that there was a problem in the past. You worked, you did something and now that problem does not exist. You need me as an investor to carry forward that impact. So that is one way of to start. And the other one is I like the. Imagine if. Imagine if we don't have any pollution. Imagine if we don't have any inequality. You don't have to go for the impact. This is something I care about a lot. But imagine if every SME has access to good accountancy software without paying millions of dollars. That is us. So something you want to happen, you will create for your customers that the impact and you're taking it to today, imagine what the world will be, how much Resources will be saved, how much people will have enjoyable time, whatever the problem you're solving and you bring it to today. So those are two effective formats that I would like you to try in building, crafting your story. There will be attention and this is actually the question that Bjorn asked. People make decisions based on the chemicals that are going to be in their body. Maybe this is like too much of a science fiction to you, but I strongly suggest you watch every movie with a different lens. And that's how the Star wars come in. The lightsaber comes into the picture. People make decisions based on the emotions, based on the feelings they have, they are having in their physical environment, in their body. If you do not start a really good story, if you really start doing this and talk to people like this, they are not going to pay any attention. I'm really jumping in my seat to keep you get, keep your attention and have you understand, have you feel the energy. I'm creating tension, I'm creating focus. I'm trying to take you with me or although I'm in my home in Istanbul and most of you are in 50 different countries, this is difficult and I need to work my butt off to get you feel attached to it. So I had to create some tension, I had to make some jokes, I had to create some props. So you start paying different attention because this is really difficult to watch over a screen. And if you don't work on that mix of chemicals, it's. If you don't get me excited, if you don't make me happy, if you don't create empathy and that's what the stories will create for you, then you're not going to get my attention. Even if it's a two and a half minute pitch, I lose it like this. Two and a half minutes is actually pretty long time to get attention lost. And to Bjorn's question, why are we focusing on the pitch but not on the business? That's life. I don't have whole day investors, don't have the whole day to spend with you to understand whatever you're doing that you spent three years working. I know it's really painful to put three years of work into two and a half minutes, but I did that myself in San Francisco. I pitched to Tim Draper what I had been working for a very long time and it is painful. I completely sympathize. But the aim of the two and a half minute pitch is, is to get a 20 minutes conversation online or offline. The aim of that 20 minute conversation is to get an Hour of meeting that goes into details. The aim of that one hour meeting is to get a three hour meeting with different partners. So this two and a half minute pitch is not going to help you close deals. That's not going to happen. This will only create perception on my side and I will agree if it's worth spending more time with you or not. And I have to be able to do that in two and a half minutes because I'm pitched a lot and if I don't get that two and a half minutes, I don't get the energy, I don't get the attention, I don't get the hope. There are so many people competing for my attention. You might be a better business, but if you suck at pitching, you're not going to go anywhere, at least in terms of fundraising. And again, I can't tell you enough, but Hero's journey, which was engraved on my. It's in the tattoo is really important, so I'm not going to go too much into detail. But this is a really good book, Hero with a Thousand faces. So I strongly advise you to see this. This is basically a mythology of every religion, every story, every generation, every culture has this Hero's journey and you are the hero in this story. So you need to understand how you can communicate your struggle and your passion. This is a very easy way to expand and put some frame into your value proposition pitch. And we'll share this slide with you so you don't have to take pictures or anything. But this is really difficult in order for you to make me understand where you will be going with your project, with your startup. I need to understand a few things. To start with, I need to understand who the customer is, I need to understand what you're doing, I need to understand the value proposition. And if you have the time, maybe this is a conversational pitch. If you have the time, I really would like to understand your competitive advantage. And if you can pull this off, this is a good practice. This is not something that goes directly into your pitch, but this is the, these are the messages I need to understand in a cleaner format. So it goes by saying, our software, our app, helps this customer group who want to solve this problem they have by providing them with this and removing some obstacles. And if you can also mention in the competition, that will work amazingly. But this is really difficult. So I just want to put this through as a kind of thought exercise which is critical. So we went through this and again the, the critical piece is again, this, this, this short piece. We're Gonna move into a different presentation. Now. Your struggle needs to show your struggle that you faced. Building a team, building a product, getting to customers, getting funding, leaving your job. Find those are all in you. So I really need to understand that hope, that struggle you went through to trust you with my money or my attention or my time. If you are not able to do that, then it becomes just like everybody else, they are also doing this. They're also doing this. Companies don't compete with each other. Companies founders compete with each other on a more harsh level. If you are a better founder, you will have more attention of teams, more attention of investors, more attention of customers. So don't trust on your technology. You are the leading force in your company and you need to be able to communicate that pretty clearly. So if Burak, if you can go into the next slides, then I'll go really quick on some of the key elements that I would like to see in a pitch and some of the things that I don't like to see in a pitch. So yes, perfect. Thank you so much. This actually kind of pretty works. So there are really things that you should be avoiding in your pitch and one of them is you need to understand you need to have two versions of the same pitch. One version is something you'll pitch on stage or on the screen that will not have any text on it, that will not have too much text on it, that will really have the story. Because you will be pitching, you are the actor, and the deck is helping you. When you're emailing the same deck, you are not there to pitch. So the same deck, the same presentation, you need to flip it where the deck is the actor and you are the one who's sending it. So you're not even there. One version will have text, the other will have lots of pictures. Do not mix those two. And don't send me the pitch you made on stage because if it's a good one, it'll just gonna have a few words and a few sentences and a big picture or a big product demonstration. I'm not gonna understand anything if I haven't seen you on stage. And probably I'm not gonna understand anything because I'm gonna have forgotten about you anyways. So please don't forget that the pitch you make on stage is different than the pitch you send to investors when they ask you to send it. So those are critical things. On one version you write a lot. On the email version, on the other version you don't. But other than that, please don't forget to Spell check. I hate to see founders do spelling errors. English may not be your first native language, but please make sure you do spell check. Don't make a lot of bullet points. That just confuses one slide, one message. That is really important key because humans don't have that kind of attention span. And please don't just put a lot of animations back and forth going. That is not best practice even on stage. So don't do that. The second is you need to understand people are not necessarily like you. What I mean by that, you might be an engineer, you might be a kinesthetic learner. So you try to make me understand things by giving me demos, but if I like to see things, if I'm more visual or if I'm more auditory in learning now that's like personal characteristics. You can't change how I learn, how I perceive things. So because of this, you need to understand that you need to put all three kinds of learning sensors into the presentations. You need to have images. Your voice should be one of the key, key auditory tactics. And you also need to show me how things work. If it's a technology, hardware are easier. But even if it's a website, you need to show me exactly, don't just tell me because unless you do it, if I don't get that, I'll, I'll be just lost. The other thing which you have an advantage over here is you need to understand who you are going to be pitching. Are these people angel investors? Do they have a fund? What level, what stage are their fund in? Do they invest in the exact same technology you're looking for? You need to understand a lot of these metrics and a lot of these questions because if you know who you're pitching to exactly, then you can tweak your messaging, you can put in personalized perspective. What do they care about? And elephant Brock presented you with the list of speakers. You need to understand your connection to them by researching them. So don't, don't forget about this. If you're going on a stage or if you're going to pitch much like I'm doing now, please make sure you have the technology ready. So usually when I do this on stage, I bring my own clicker, I bring my own laptop charger, I bring my own multi sided plug. I do a lot of things to get prepared because if anything goes wrong during my pitch, I will be failing. And I don't want to fail. I will not maybe have another chance. Maybe everything fails. So I always have my phone with me. Just in case my wi fi fails, I'll do a hotspot before the presentations. My daughter is just next door and I told her do not play Minecraft or do not play Roblox when I'm doing the presentation, otherwise my wi fi will be jammed. She doesn't like me for that, but I'm the dad so sometimes I get away with this. These are really important. Please, please, please, please make sure you have everything that that has to work for you. That should work for you because Murphy rules work. Unfortunately, if something can go wrong, there is a good chance that it will go wrong. So that's the Murphy's rule and probably you know it already. You need to be prepared. So before the pitch, before your time comes as a pitch. This is mostly for a physical pitching stations, but this also applies to most other things. So if your wi fi doesn't work, you need to give Burak a call, ask for his phone number, get on Slack if anything goes wrong on a technical glitch. If you still have time, please make sure you know how to cover that. PowerPoints usually don't work because your phones may not be on the other person's laptop or computer. So I would strongly suggest to use PDFs instead of PowerPoints or keynotes. Keynote suck. I like Apple. Actually I don't like Apple too much. But as a product, as a presentage presentation mode, PDF works in both machines. If you're going to be late in anything, please make sure you're Swiss, German or Japanese for time. Don't be a Middle Eastern like we are. Be on time and respect people's time. When you are launching, much like I am now, please be happy, make sure you're giving positive energy. And this is not some Kumbaya shit. This is more like energy transmitting to the other person. Let them enjoy being in the company of you. And if there is a Q and A session, please listen first. You have two ears, one mouth. When answering session. In Q and A sessions, please listen more than just trying to rush up with answers. If I see you, you're paying more attention and listening, I will respect you more. And even if I'm curious about the answer, I'm more curious about how you react to the question, not how you answer the question. So those are a couple of different things. So there will be a couple of examples that I can send you. Those are good. One thing I would really like you to do before and you have almost a month to do it, you need to practice so tips and tricks on the storytelling and on the other stuff, the first 30 seconds is really critical. I would argue the first 15 seconds is really critical because you don't want to lose my attention. There will be 15 or 20 pitches back to back to back and investors will lose attention. This is online. I have everything going around me. If you want me to pay attention to you, you need to grab my attention so it doesn't come out of nowhere. I'll send you this very nice pitch. So something that you'll take a good example of. He's talking about a very technical medical device, but he manages to tell the story of how he built the medical device on a level that even a grandmother would understand. So that's another thing. One thing I strongly suggest is keep in mind that if you start strong with a lot of energy, a lot of passion, and if you repeat what you think is important for me to remember three times during a two and a half minute pitch, not with the same words, but with the same structure of same messaging, and if you finish strong with a good ask, good designed fundraising ask or sales ask or a company ask, then I will probably remember you. And the first thing you want me to do is to remember you so I can get back to you and I'll remember what you've done. So again, there are a few presentations that I'll attach that, that will give you a few tips as well. So this is a critical point where we all know you don't have everything that you require to build a large company. You are a startup, you don't have enough funding, you don't have enough technology, you don't have enough team members, you don't have enough this and this and this and that. But I don't want to know about what you lack. I want you to be honest about what you feel you don't have yet. But I also want you to be really ambitious and proud about what you have. So if you have traction, and that may be an answer to some of the questions, if you're in very early idea stage, it is really difficult to stand out of the other startups. You need to show me you have built something that somebody is interested to use, pay for, advise, refer, spend time with whatever you define as your business model, please make sure you show it to me. If you really have been working together for three years as a team, that is a strength. I need to know this. Don't just put three figure heads and say, oh, this guy does this, this guy does that, this guy does that. This will be a disservice to all the work you've done. So you need to be very careful in understanding what your strengths are, because those are the things that will give me hope. If you don't have anything that you are really good at, why would I care about it? And again, this is why pitching is also very important. I seen this mistake done a lot of times, and I'm not gonna ask this question, which I usually do on slides, but I'm going to tell you, show you exactly the same text, but in different order. And I really want you to stop and think about how your reaction would be if you were. If you were me listening to this. So one is, they have a great pitch, but they had a terror. They had a great product or a great team, but they had a terrible pitch versus they had a terrible pitch, but they have a great team. So I am saying exactly the same thing, word by word, but I just flipped the order. This is a very common startup mistake. You might not have everything you need, but don't play yourself and don't make the first line of mistake. You have to give me hope. They had a terrible pitch, but they have a great team. So my perception is there's something good about this. In the first version, first phrase, they have a great team, but they had a terrible pitch. That's a bad connotation. I don't like what I've seen. Although they had a great team, they didn't care about the pitch. I'm not going to end well with that sentence. So don't make this mistake. Sometimes I see startups doing this. Oh, we. We have no customers because we didn't have any money. Okay, we didn't have any money, but now we have customers. That's much better. So please, please, please make me feel there's something good about you that I need to take care of, that I need to pay attention to. Don't make this very, very cheap mistake. One thing I really like, as you've seen before, do or do not. There is no try. You either have a memorable pitch or you don't have a memorable pitch. You don't try. You just do a memorable pitch. Practice. But. Oh, I tried my best. That's a loser's attitude. Don't. Don't do this. I'm here. I'm going to pitch my best, and I did my best. Okay? That's it. That's what we want from you. Before you pitch. My recommendation is don't write a script and try to pitch it. Do the other way around. Record yourself pitching your presentation. Then Write the script, then translate that into a script and just count the words. See how fast you're going. If you're going too fast, you need to slow down. But don't memorize a pitch. It just kills all the energy, all the momentum. It just kills everything that's, that's that you build on. Another issue is this is really important. You need to be balanced in getting feedback. Pick strangers. There are so many events that are happening online. Go to online pitching events. Try it. You definitely have to pitch at least half of the time to males, to guys, and half of the time to ladies. You have to get this right because the, the perception and the perspectives of females and males are completely different. Guys and girls look into different things, look into different gaps. So you need to be pitching not just to guys, which is super easy. Everybody's like, in this startup ecosystem, there are a lot of guys and girls, but you need to find people who you would respect their opinion. And it's very easy to find. Everything is online now. Just tweet to people, find investors who are doing something that's remotely close to you and just tell me, I have a 2 1/2 minute pitch. Would you please spend the time and give me feedback? I'm going through an accelerator. I would really need your help. And a lot of people are, these days are super helpful because everybody is going through this Covid crisis at the same time. Now the deck. What do you need to include in the pitch so you don't have to follow this order? You may change the order, but my advice to you is play it safe. And doing this, what I'm going to show you in the order because investors are used to hearing in this order. So there had been an academic study, actually, you know, you probably know DocSend. So it's a tool where lots of startups use, lots of investors use. And a group of people studied the decks that are sent using DocSend to investors and they checked which slides investors were spending the most time, which slides they looked multiple times, which slides they skimmed through, and what were really important. So this is kind of a mix, but investors are used to looking into one thing just to make it more effective. So two, five minutes, one minute, three and a half minutes, doesn't matter. You need to have these incorporated into your storyboard. Story of the problem, the storytelling part, which we mentioned a little bit earlier, you choose whichever part you want, either from future to present or from past to present. And you worked your story through your customer. If you have traction, you move on to traction, you say this was the problem and this was the problem for 10,000 of our users before we launched our product. This was the problem for five of these large companies that you see behind me in logos before we solve them our hardware. This was the problem that these individuals were having before we were able to give them the product they needed. So traction in the form of users, actual users or customers or people who actually bought stuff, those may be two different things. You need to mention this very early on. If you have traction, you need to show me traction. Don't wait until the last 10 seconds or the two and a half minutes because I will already have made my judgment about you. I would start paying more attention to you. If you are growing in numbers, users, customers, better users, alpha users, whatever you call them, versus if you just keep that at the last second, it can be revenue. But sometimes your business models don't require revenue at the first place. So that's really tricky. But please, if you have traction, show me traction. The second is a really clear perspective on why customers want you, why customers need you, why are you a painkiller for them versus a vitamin. What I mean by this is if you're solving a mission critical problem for your customers or I want to know what that is. In times of crisis, people focus on their immediate problems. They look away from aspirations. It will be nice to have this, but now I have to focus on solving my real issue. So you need to be able to explain me why that problem is really big. One thing that investors really like is so what, why now? Why do you think this startup needs to happen today? What will happen and how big that startup can go. If this is the right time. This is really important. Most of the engineers in the crowd will not like this, but investors don't give a crap about their technology too much. We would like to know if there's intellectual property, but we don't want to know if unless you have done three years of research. Everything can be easily replicable as long as you don't have a really nice team that executes everything. So technology is really good, but this is not a technology engineering competition. This is a startup competition or a startup accelerated program. Not a competition at all. So you need to tell me why the technology is necessary, but most importantly why it's necessary from the business model you're pursuing. Competitors are really critical. Please, please, please do not bad mouth competitors. Please do not put subjective comparisons like they have a terrible UI ux. This is, this is your judgment and not probably your competitor will not like what he hears or even the investors will think you don't know what you're doing. Because having a bad UI UX is not a competitive advantage. And it's a subjective issue, it's not objective. So you need to understand why you are better from the competitors. From an objective standpoint, being cheap is not a competitive advantage. Please don't tell me you're cheap because it means the minute your competitor lowers your prices, you're dead. I don't like that. Cost effective is another issue. Cheap, that's not. That doesn't make sense. But value proposition wise, being cost effective could be important. Usually we like to finish with the team. Unless you're doing something really, really technical, please don't start with the team. I would like to see the team towards the end and the team has to have what I call the A team attitude. Somebody who knows how to sell, somebody. Somebody who knows how to build. Somebody who knows how to manage. So those three factors are really important. If you guys are all engineers and you all like to build, who's going to sell this? Who's going to run this? So you need to be able to tell me. I'm the engineer, but I'm not the cto. I'm focused on sales. I'm an engineer. I did this, I did that. But I'm, I'm going to be doing the finances, I'm going to be doing the fundraising and operations. So you need to tell me you're, you're focusing on the functions, not the degrees. And of course, please, please, please finish with a good ask. You need to ask. You need to be able to tell me you have studied the ask. What I mean is I'm raising $100,000 is not an ask. It's just wishful thinking and I wish this lightsaber was true. An ask has to be concise and has to be tied to measured metrics and milestones. You have to tell me we're going to spend $60,000 on marketing because in our previous tests we have seen our cost of acquiring customers about 60 cents. So it's $60,000 spent. We're going to have 10,000 customers more or less. And that 10,000 customers is going to bring us this much revenue. That is a good solid ask. Don't tell me we're going to spending $20,000 on the product. Who cares? What will happen when you spend that $20,000 on the product is once we have this, we will have a certification and we will be industry grade products which will create A new market for us. Okay, that's a business milestone. I don't care how much you're giving to which employee. I need to know what will happen if you spend my money on certain topics. Please, please do not say R and D. R and D is research and development. That's done in university labs. You are a startup. You are doing product development, not research and development. Research is unknown. It doesn't have any milestones because you're just searching. Maybe it won't work. That's the university stuff. You are doing product development. That's why you need to spend the money on product. You might, of course, but why would you need to spend the money on the product? Not just because you want more technology, not just because you're just super geeks, but because it ties to a business perspective. The result, that's really critical. So just going through the slide decks, of course you have to really have a nice design. Please just don't, please don't make your slides look like it's being created by a high schooler. Pay $10, $20, $50, $100 to somebody. There's so many freelancers available to you. Just give your deck to somebody who's a designer and make them have them help you make it look good. So slide one, logo, one catchphrase. We are X. We sell the best software. We are this. It's not the Nike. Just do it. It's not a slogan. The first slide will need to tell help you tell me what. Am I going to be listening? So we are X. We help the first ad lib. Remember the value proposition. We help customers solve this problem. That's it. Simple. I need to know what you're doing. The second if you're great, the storytelling part, the problem through the customer's perspective. This is going to be really important. Do not tell me anything about the technology. Oh, we built this great technology. It has a camera on the front, it has a camera on the back. It's touch screen. I don't care about this. What am I going to do with this? What is the problem I am solving by using this is more important than the technology. In the 2 1/2 minute pitch, the solution is really critical. But again the solution not from a technical standpoint. How you figured out the way, the smart way, the efficient way, the cost efficient way. Probably to solve that problem that I just mentioned. Oh, my customers had this problem and I built this solution. The app helps you do this, that the hardware helps them do this, that this is really important. You need to be very concise in this business model. Don't, don't over complicate stuff. Don't tell me you're going for B2C and then B2G and then maybe if you have enough money, B2B2C that just focus on one business model, please. The one that you are going to try first should be the focus. One message, one slide. If you want to go and try to tell me now it's this business model, but six months it will be a different business model. I already think you don't know what you're doing. Please focus. Things will change. Don't tell me multiple scenarios. Oh, we prepared everything, every scenario possible. That's just focus on the initial business model you're going to be targeting. And if it doesn't work, of course I will expect you to do something else. Not just give up. But start with one business model. Here is important, a little bit of competitive advantage, but mostly comparison. Here's how it's been done. Here's a different attitude we're doing. It can be technology here, it can be research. If it's research based it can help you. But it's mostly sector advantage. Maybe you worked in that sector for three years, five years, 10 years. Take a look at the Zoom example. Why is Zoom the best product? Because the guy worked in Cisco WebEx and knew it sucked so he went out and built Zoom. So not that he's a great engineer, but he faced the problem firsthand. So I can help you. But marketing and sales is usually something most of the idea state startups think they can skip. I need to know your go to market strategy. Social media is not a go to market strategy. Paying advertising is not a go to market strategy. Go to market strategy is about how you're understanding your customers and how you're connecting with them. I'm going to launch a big social media campaign and I'm gonna go viral. Guess not. You're not going anywhere with that rhetoric. Let me not drop another F F bomb over here. So please, please, please make sure you understand what a go to market strategy is. You spend time in understanding this. It's either channel partnerships working with integrators, going to fairs is also another go to market strategy. So please understand what this means. And if you don't, you're not going to go anywhere. Competitive landscape is important. I need to know. This is a really good checkpoint. If there are competitors of you that I know and if you're not presenting them, I would assume you're either thinking I'M a fool, or I don't know what I'm doing, or you think you can get away with this? Or worse, you actually don't know who your competitors are. Putting many logos might feel intimidating at first. You might think, as an investor, I would assume it's a very competitive market. But that's a good thing. If I believe everything you said about your product, your customer, your value proposition, I would like a lot of competitors because a lot of competitors would mean there's a big market. A lot of competitors would mean there are gaps, probably that none of them have closed yet. So let me be the judge of what I think your value is. Just don't be afraid of competition or just presenting competition. And please don't tell. No competition is bad. We are the greatest. And probably not you aspire to be, which is great. Management team. I. I already mentioned this a little bit earlier. We already know you're not a perfect team. We want to know how you plan to be a perfect team. We already know you don't have everything sorted out, but we want to know you have a plan to sort everything out. And maybe not with just money. Maybe you're at a stage where you need a really good board of advisors. You might say we are at the technical development stage. We're looking for an advisory board member who will guide us through the technology. Okay, that's good. You know what you don't know, which means you can work your butt off to create a solution for it. If you don't know what you don't know, then it just becomes a huge risk. One of the final things I really like, again, this is not the order that's in the five slides or the storyboard. Please have milestones. Easiest way to do this. This slide can go to the end by saying, if we raise $100,000, here's how much we're going to spend it on, and here's what will happen in 12 to 18 months. The the rule of thumb is usually raising enough funding for 18 months. Raising enough funding for 18 months, which is around when you're about a year off after the fundraising. You still have time to finish what you haven't been able to if your metrics were not going as good. You still have time to recover, and you'll also have time to pitch to other investors and maybe to close around. Don't raise for only six months because it will take you three to four months to close it anyway. So you're just going to be spending a lot of time for nothing. So Try to make sure you're asking for a good amount of money that will carry you forward for 12 to 18 months. 18 months is the optimal. And don't, don't screenshot Excel sheets. That's not the purpose of the presentation. I need to know. You did some homework. You have a model. I need to know the chart. Here's how many customers, here's how much revenue, here's how the milestones will work. I don't need to know an Excel model on a 2 1/2 minute pitch. Please don't do this. Just don't. I might ask for it later if I want to meet with you on a longer time frame, but not on the deck. Again, these are again, this could be a part of your story, the status and the timeline. This is really critical. I need to know what you have accomplished so far. Two things. Two, three things. What you're working on now, going back and forth two months, one month. What you will be working on. What are the milestones you think you'll be reaching in about six months to a year? I don't want to have this whole diagram of like a snake. Oh, we win on this. Competitions. We were drinking beer when we had the idea. Oh, it was great. We pitched and then this happened. Oh, we were on a plane where we met this person. I don't need to know those details. I just need to know the critical milestones and actual steam that you, you have that carries you forward. And of course, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, practice, practice, practice, practice. Most of it is if you have the book. If you don't have it, have it. It's Guy Kawasaki, who was also a guest on Startup Istanbul's webinars. It's the Art of the Start. It's a really good book, just a really slim one that you need to read. Garage Wrenches Pitch Deck. If you search for Garage Ranchers Pitch deck, you'll see a very general example of what I just show you. And I think your job is now to make a lot of trials. Do as much as you can to test this out. And where am I going? I'm going here. Please do a good pitch. Don't just try. Make a good pitch. And may the force be with you.

Thank you, ozan.

Thank you very much. You are welcome.

Okay guys, thank you very much for being with us today. I think we will meet tomorrow. We will have one to one mentorships. If you haven't booked your sessions, please book them now for this week and we will share this recording and also presentation My presentation with you on this slide. Please check your messages over there. And we kiss the little guy. He's about to sleep.

Are we going to take.

Are we going to take what?

Question and answer. If you have any question to Ozan.

Yes, please go ahead. Let me check the questions also. Deck design are really matter in startup success.

Tell you 40 more times. The deck design is really important to me. It shows how seriously you're taking. If you haven't spent time on presenting and just worked on building it, then I would only assume you just want to build. Presenting is as important, especially very early stages, as important as your product. And please work with a designer. There are so many people really talented that can get you really good design at really cheap prices. So it's just 15 slides. So work on it. How to present market fit or product tech under the instructions. Good question. I mean the previous one. Also a good question. Numbers. If you're showing me you're growing 10% month over month, it's already a market fit. I don't need to know anything else. If you're not growing 10% month over month, it means you don't have a product market fit. So when it comes to product market fit, it's really easy because the customers are driving the product out of you. Even if you don't want to sell them, they just come and get it. That's the product market fit. Before that you might assume you have product market fit, but you probably don't. If you're not growing significantly, you don't have a product market fit. How can you illustrate that in a story you just put? 2 graphics 1. Three months ago we launched. One month ago we had 100 customers. Now we have 300 customers. Why are these people coming to us? Because of this and this and this. Or you can say here are three customers world known. Why are they working with us? Because we provide them the most effective, cost effective efficiency, cloud based, whatever the value propositions, whatever they are coming to you for. You can mention this through the lens of the customer, but the technology does not fit the market and practices. I mean you get the point.

We have another question from Tariq.

If I don't have one man show and other things, no, it won't work. I will probably never invest. And there are a lot of startups, the startup investors that will never ever invest in a single man, one man show. It tells me three messages. One. You don't know how to sell, how to tell the good story and you're not able to convince anybody to work with you. Two, you are a control freak. You don't want to share responsibilities, you don't know how. You know how to delegate, but you don't know how to share wealth and information. And three, it means you, you. Nobody likes to work with you. So all three are really difficult. So there are of course different cases. You might assume from the stories you hear that Elon Musk is a lone one man show. He's not. He didn't build Tesla on his own. He didn't build a technology on his own. He, he partnered with actual, the original designers and founders. Even on SpaceX, he's not the only guy. Yes, one man shows, one woman shows. It can work, but it just. I really need to know a little bit more to understand why that is the case. Because this is about teamwork. You might have 20 people working under you, but if you haven't been able to convince somebody to come as a co founder when there is so much talent everywhere, I will have so many second thoughts on this. That can work. There's no, this is not like a rule of law. It's not like physics, when there's one law and everybody abides. But it will be really difficult for you to convince people. One good story is Dropbox. When Dropbox founders were drew first came to Y Combinator, Paul Graham told him, you go and you find a co founder, otherwise I'm not going to work with you. So PJ did what Drew thinks is the best move ever. So he forced him to find a co founder to share responsibility, share wealth, share the future, the story. So then they, they funded and then the rest is history. So please try to find something else. Somebody else. Sebastian's question, of course, no. So the product is the least important part of your deck. I need to see how it looks. But don't pitch me the product, pitch me the problem, pitch me the customer, pitch me the market and then show me how the product looks because that will show me that you're able to build a product that is really important. But I'm not going to care too much about it. So the product cannot tell a story. It does not have feelings. It does not have money to spend. It is. It can be scraped and thrown out for another product very easily. And here is an issue. People don't buy products. People buy what that product is going to help them solve. I am not buying an iPhone. I am buying the convenience the iPhone provides me. I don't buy coffee because coffee is the product. No, I buy the feeling and the serenity and the caffeine of the coffee that can be served through different purposes or through different products. There can be many things solving the same problem. So you need to focus on the problem and the customer. Then comes the product. Don't, don't like prey on your product, prey on your customer. I mean pray, no, it's never a good idea to add demos, demo videos of a product in the 2 1/2 minute pitch unless you practice it like hundred times. You can have a 10 second video, maybe a 15 second video of how it works. But usually when I was in San Francisco we used to do and no deck pitch nights. So you will not have a deck to show. You'll just go on stage and pitch for two and a half minutes. Here you're gonna have a deck. But maybe they're just gonna force you to get a PDF and they're not gonna let you do anything else. And sometimes not. Sometimes PDF storms accommodate video pretty well. So again, something you can do it with screenshots. Do it with screenshots. Here's how it works. So you go fast, here's the login page as if it's a video. So we go fast on the slides. It will feel it's moving. At the end of the day video is movies shown on a different frame per second. So use that as an advantage.

So let's get the last question. Ozan, you are already on the selection also I guess so people can ask you directly their questions and or we can help them to ask you.

We will make you some startups to mentor. We will select depending on their performance stand depending on the courage. Do you concurrent to our serving our country or region or typical viewing context. That is a good question. Just let me turn the lights on. I'm shining like a start. Okay. Okay. So I would like to know the global competition, not just the regional players because that could be an exit opportunity, that could be a role model to look up to. But if you don't mention them at all, I would not assume you know them. And even though you're looking into a certain region, that is good. I'm not saying you write the competition, you just tell me you know what they are doing. Take the example of Kareem and Uber. Karim always knew Uber could come into the Middle east market but they didn't care too much. They focused on their own market but they always had that comparison. They did a lot of things much, much, much different than Uber did in that situation. So I would like to know if there are other players in different geographies that you're aware of. That also tells me that there's a big market in that region as well. So if there's a company, there are sets of companies in the APAC region and there are sets of companies in Europe. If there are sets of companies in Africa and you're doing in the Middle East, I would like to know, because those markets may not be exactly the same dynamics. But here's how, let's say On Demand delivery happened in apac. Here's how On Demand happened in Europe. And this we're going to do on Demand delivery. Because as regions grow, they're going to need this. So it might make sense. I hope that's a good answer to question. Good question. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Ozone. Yes, thank you too. Great guys. We'll be happy to see you all tomorrow in Michael Zaber's webinar and Ozan. We'll be in touch with you too.

Ozone, thank you very much for your insights. Great presentation and have a great night. You too.

Yes. Have a nice day, all.

Edith, see you tomorrow. Bye. Bye.