Part 4 Marketing | Pitching Workshop

Now, in terms of your market, you really got to have this down. You're the person that needs to know the best about your market, who your actual customer is, really be able to quantify those customers for the investor. So when you guys came up to pitch, I didn't hear anything about the actual market size, how many people you guys are targeting, how many people could potentially use this. So that's something that it's good for the investor to know right away. And you could probably have a few slides and go more in detail. And in bigger audiences, it's good to put it in perspective for the audience. This is how big this market is, a $2 billion market that hasn't been disrupted so far. Actually point numbers out. And then if you guys don't know how to get market sizing, this is usually for a lot of our beginner students and stuff. But who knows? It may be useful for you. So the Facebook Ads Manager, I don't know if you guys have used it before. Any of you use Facebook Ads? Cool. If you have no way of getting any sort of numbers as to the business that you're getting, start playing around with advertisement platforms such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Pinterest has a good one too, LinkedIn. All these platforms, because they have so many users, they can actually lead you to pretty detailed or precise numbers about your market. So let's actually like do a little example with like a small business. Let's say I was building a small music store in San Francisco, and I kind of want to show the investor, you know, how many people I can potentially reach in San Francisco with this small music store. I'm selling guitars, flutes, musical instruments. And you can do this with your business, but if you guys haven't used the platform, that's why I'm using, you know, I'm showing it to you guys. Now there's plenty of ways to do this. You guys can go to census information, you guys can buy actual market information from a sites out there that do this for you. You can actually do this, which has worked very well for our students in the past. So what's cool about these platforms is that you can really narrow it down. So for example, here on Facebook Ads, we can select a location. Here I've put San Francisco, California with like a 14-mile radius, which is, you know, the people that I'll be targeting first with my music store. My ideal customer, let's say, are people between 20 and 40. And for some reason, I'm only selling to men. Let's pretend, I don't know, it's a male music store, so that's who I'm targeting. Languages doesn't really matter in our case right here, but we can put actual interests. We can say that they're interested in education. Maybe I actually teach music classes at this instrument store. And then that they're interested in music, and you can go even deeper with these things. If you only sell guitars, for example, you know, they're enthusiastic about guitars, they like things dealing with guitars through the Facebook platform before. So it'll actually give you numbers. And you just keep narrowing down based on interests, based on behaviors. So I know, for example, in your case, I know that there's a behavior on Facebook where it's like they've shopped in the past 90 days through our platform. You can actually target those specific people and get actual numbers from there. If you look over to the right-hand side right here, you'll see Down here, estimated daily reach. If you look over at the small little number right here, the 300,000— ah, fudge. Not good with Macs, guys. Where's the— OK, cool.

That's why you avoided a live demo.

Right. So you see this little number right here, the 300,000? That's 300,000 people that live in San Francisco that are in the ages between 20 and 40 that are interested in music and learning music. That's the market that I'm reaching with this music store that I'm opening in San Francisco. So it may help you guys do this. Now for B2B products, you can actually target companies and people that work for a specific company. How many people maybe book flights within companies, or how many roles do that sort of action? So I'm helping one of our students that's here in the building. She is doing a platform to take people from here within companies to Mexico. to travel for a week and be able to work in remote locations. So what we're doing first is we're actually figuring out how many people work at these companies. So through these platforms, you can actually figure out how many managers work at Google that do this sort of role. So for you guys, it may be very beneficial. Especially LinkedIn has a very good B2B feel or numbers that you can get out of. Questions?

Cool.

I have a question.

And by the way, it's free. Like you don't actually have to send out an ad.

Yeah, yeah. So when I when I have this in a deck, normally what I'll do is I'll just have like the big number that I'm trying to show. And if your business is VC-backed, chances are you probably want to have a B at the end of that number. Yeah, it looks looks like it didn't say that.

So for us with Facebook.

Where we would say that the food takeout market in the US was a $70 billion market.

Does it even matter if you're actually attacking that whole market? If they ask specific questions about it, like, yeah, we're focusing on this to start. Like, it doesn't matter.

Yeah, right. Because towards the start, when we were pitching it in the beginning, we were just operating in Austin, Texas. And there's only a million people that live in the city. But we weren't selling that number. We were selling the number that we —wanted to get to as a market size.

Cool. So once we touch on the market and they kind of get how big it is, how much money you could probably potentially get, you want to point out the traction. So I know we spoke about traction before. Super important. I think it's one of the most important things from the actual pitch, showing that you guys have hustled and know how to get customers and have a formula to get customers is super important. So you want to show users and numbers. If you're a very early product, what we usually tell the entrepreneurs that are really just starting off, there's different ways to show traction. You can get an email list of a bunch of potential customers that are interested in your product. So one of the good cases that we point out is the founder of a dating website called The League, Amanda Bradford. What she did was before she even built an app, before she did anything, she validated it by actually throwing parties and Getting thousands of users to sign up on her email list and just interested in the product. And once she had this big list, this is what she went to the investor with. And she said, look, there's thousands of people interested in our product. We haven't built it yet, but we're going to build it. And we know what we need to do for our first version. So if you guys don't have users yet, figure out how you can show that sort of traction, that you've actually talked to users, that you have people interested in your product. When you guys were raising at first, did you have an MVP? Or how'd you start with your customers, just to hear a little bit?

Oh, for traction? Well, we had pretty low traction when we first fundraised. I don't think it necessarily has to be a huge number if it's a seed stage thing. For later stage funding, as you get through it, I always like to put the traction slide as a chart and make it look up and to the right.

That hockey stick. It helps when it actually looks up to the right. As an investor, what have you seen over the past few years?

A lot of our startups are B2B. So yeah, we get a lot of letters of intent. Or sometimes they would even get a high-ranking person, like a high-level executive within an airline, stating that he would personally sell this to the company or whatever, and he doesn't have any affiliation to the company. And so they provide us with funding like that. But because we're a corporate venture arm, we are able to actually test it internally with the relevant business units before we even think about making a decision.

And can I just go around the room and see Can you tell me kind of what traction you guys have so far with your products?

So we had 2 early access campaigns last year with about 1,500 users. And we now have a bit more than 1,000 people on the waitlist additionally. And about, I would say, 50 companies are lined up for the beta.

OK, great. We haven't released the product, but we have interest from about 3 senior housing partners as well as a technology company for some of the hardware side. We have 4,000 loan requests in the last 6 months, and we approved 25 loans. Cool. And that's growing? Do you guys have metrics already set in place where you guys are increasing 10% every month? Well, we are doubling the amount of loan requests every 2 months.

OK, cool.