Part 5 Go to Market Stratedgy | Pitching Workshop

Also, so if you do have numbers like that, make sure you can back it up. Because someone might call you out on your bullshit. So the next slide is the competition. So raise your hands if you have competition.

Everyone.

Everyone should be raising their hands. So an investor wants to know that you have competition to know if this is a market worth pursuing. If no one's doing it, it could be a bad sign. Or maybe you're just working on something that's completely revolutionary. But chances are— That's not going to happen. So here you want to talk about your direct competitors. You can also talk about their traction. But more importantly, you want to talk about what makes your product different. Be it team, be it some kind of secret sauce you have. Just make sure you mention that. And also, it's really— a good way to explain this is to have some kind of chart. Have you guys seen this before, like a competitive landscape chart? Yeah. What do you guys use when you present?

Yeah, I mean, you're right. Sometimes you can have some sort of visual that It shows the quadrants of the space that they're attacking. And you can have different variables be the thing that you're comparing it to. Maybe it's price or type of customer or something. But something that visually shows why you're different and what the overall market looks like for these competitors. I think a lot of times it's actually good if you're not the first mover advantage within a market, but instead you're a fast follower. Because you can see what the other competition is, and then you can speak easier to what's working and what's not working for those companies. For example, for your company, for Fable, I can think of a zillion types of competitors. That's why there's a lot.

Because it's the same thing.

I can say that anybody that can give you cash or money is a competitor. Yeah, I mean, back then when we first started, there wasn't necessarily as much competition. When we first were talking about it, there were a lot of regionalized mom-and-pops locations that didn't even have mobile ordering yet. And so we were able to talk about how it's mobile first. And then we also had— A bunch of competitors who they would only allow you to get deliveries from their partners. And on our platform, you could order from places that were not our partners. So you could get anything. And those were the 2 pieces that were truly different and novel. And so we spoke to those elements. What did you present as competitors?

Conservative delivery services? Or something like Gett or Uber, which you can generate a delivery which is not consistent? Well, back then it was like— Back then.

Traditional startups. Or actually Postmates were the main guys, and then local players. Depending on our audience. If we were in Austin, where we're from, we were pitching, we'd talk about local guys. But if we were in the Valley, we'd talk about the startups that were at seed stage in the Valley. No, it's way different now. By the time you can get to Series A, Series B, basically every single stage becomes more about your company and the metrics behind it. Whereas the earlier you are, it's more about, hey, Hey, you're investing in me as a team. So that's what's interesting is if you're second-time entrepreneurs like we are, it's almost like we can just lean on the fact that we've done things in the past. And it's just like, we don't even have anything, but you're investing in us as a team. We don't have to show anything. But we know that as soon as we actually get going, it's going to be all about our traction and numbers and our margins. The later on you get, it becomes more about the actual business and less about you.

But to answer your question about what to use when you have A lot of competitors, choose a slice of it that's going to be the closest thing, and then try to talk to the pieces that are different.

If they bring up other guys, just explain why they're way different, or it's out in left field.

Then sometimes when you don't think you have competitors— and I've had tons of students that have it— there's always a competitor, whether it's a process on how the customer actually takes that action right now, whether they're communicating through Slack and then picking something out, like, I don't know, So if you have a group of friends that want to pick out a restaurant, and you're building an app that really just presents 3 restaurants for them, and they can vote on it, how are they doing it now? They're getting together. They're actually talking to each other, going through Yelp, picking out a restaurant. So sometimes if there's not an actual competitor in terms of an app or a company that's doing it, the actual process is your competitor, how they're doing it right now.

Cool.

All right, so next thing you want to show is your go-to-market strategy. It kind of goes along with Your competitive advantage. So an example we always like to use is Tinder. And it kind of goes to growth hacking as well. So what Tinder did in the beginning is they got a bunch of sorority sisters together and they said, download our app. So they got a bunch of women on the app. And then they went to a frat and told them to download the app and then threw a party for all of them. So they went around the country doing this. So this is where you talk about how you're going to penetrate that market, right? Also talk about how much it costs to get get each customer. So for example, Instacart, they have a referral program. Or not a referral— as soon as you sign up, you get $20. So that goes along with the cost of acquisition. Uber, Lyft, they're really popular for doing referral programs, which is great for acquiring customers. So talk about your strategy here.

Here, what I like to show is that you have an actual formula as to how to get your customers. That you kind of know it already. You know that if you bring in $10,000, you know you're going to acquire this much. because you've tested it a specific way. I've sat down with Tim and Andy. I know you guys have dealt with Andy. And they love it when you tell them, if I bring in $10,000 into this specific marketing campaign or into this type of acquisition, I know I'm going to get 2,000 users or X amount of users.

Right.

So having that go-to-market strategy— for me, for example, I'm building an app. It's a call receptionist for small businesses. So think of Google Voice attached to an actual receptionist that'll answer your calls. Right? And so there's millions of companies that— not millions, but hundreds of companies that do this with actual receptionists. So one of the things that I'm doing differently is actually the strategy behind acquiring our customers. So I've built a list of over 15,000 mom-and-pop shops around the country that sell mobile devices. And what we're doing is we're partnering with these stores and offering it to the small businesses that walk into these stores. So it's a completely different strategy that no one else really has tried in this specific market. And that's one One of the things that makes us different, how we're acquiring those customers and that market strategy.

Yeah, so something else on this slide. So a lot of times founders, they think that they'll have some sort of message that's like, we have XYZ traction, and guess what? We haven't spent any money on marketing yet. And I actually think that's not a good thing to say. I actually think it's better to have some of your money allocated towards trying a couple of these things, because it will give you an early read on how much it's going to cost It's really important to know how much it costs to acquire customers and which channels, aka like how you're speaking to the customers, and what's working and what's not working. So toy around with a couple customer acquisition strategies.

And the more money you're raising, the more this matters, because it's pretty likely that you're going to use a lot of your money to acquire customers. So the more money you're raising, the more money it matters that you have your cost of acquisition figured out.

Yeah. And with the later stage stuff, like last year we spent many millions of dollars on customer acquisition, and you get more predictable with those rates, and then, you know, something's off, you can sell the awards.

Any cool strategies, like go-to-market strategies that you guys are trying out in your businesses? Like how are you acquiring customers right now? Well, it's purely organic.

OK.

So for the Play Store? For the what?

Play Store.

Oh, OK. Gotcha. Nothing else? Do you have any other—

Well, only news. Like when we go in a list of hot startups in Brazil, there's a lot of new customers. But purely organic. We didn't spend anything yet.

I think something else too. I think that when you start spending a lot of money, you want to make Yeah, I think you need to make sure that you have product-market fit first. Like, sometimes, like, if you're spending a bunch of money and those people are not converting deeper in the funnel, or the people that are converting don't come back at all, there's very poor retention, then you shouldn't be spending a lot of money on customer acquisition. But once you do have product-market fit, you need to rely on other sources other than organic because it's all about capitalizing on the opportunity as fast as possible, and that requires a lot of cash behind it. So, like, we get a lot of customer through organic as a source, but we'd get even more customers if we do paid. So we always layer in much more paid with it in order to really product-market fit.