Hi, I'm Adam Dakin Managing Director of Dreamit Healthtech.
Welcome to the Dreamit Dose.
We're gonna do a series of doses revealing the common pitch mistakes
and self-inflicted wounds that we see almost every day.
Remember, investors are looking for reasons to say no.
So even small mistakes can put you on the expressway to the no bucket.
The good news. These are easy to fix.
Here are 3 things you have to stop saying in your pitch.
#1. Buzzword bingo.
Peppering your deck with buzzwords like reinvent,
revolutionize, disrupt, disintermediate,
transform, and reimagine
actually demonstrates a total lack of imagination.
These are so overused they no longer have impact.
Clichés like fill in the blank is broken are also worthless.
When you say things like healthcare is broken, it only proves
in the words of Sherlock Holmes that you have a keen grasp of the obvious.
Most customers actually don't want to be disrupted or disintermediated.
Imagine saying, "Excuse me Mr. Customer, may I disrupt you for a moment?"
This is especially true in healthcare.
Overworked providers won't consider anything that adds 5 minutes to their day.
Aligning with, rather than disrupting, existing workflows is a must.
As one of my favorite cartoons illustrates,
most customers want to believe they're being innovative
yet they don't really want to change existing workflows.
For many platforms, the value is in providing customers a way
to smoothly transition to new or improved workflows.
But not disrupting or disintermediating.
#2. Overuse of superlatives.
Many entrepreneurs can't resist asserting self-proclaimed superiority
by using superlatives that describe their platform as superior,
exceptional, the best, and the only one.
Saying the only one is a surrogate for the perennial favorite,
we have no competition.
This will have investors reaching for their smartphones
faster than you can say Series A.
No matter how passionately you believe in your platform,
investors won’t. Not without proof.
This is also a symptom of being uncoachable
and lacking self-awareness.
In the words of Ben Franklin, "Well done is better than well said."
So don't tell investors your platform will bone crush the competition,
prove it with data and evidence.
A strong competitor slide along with a use case demo
is a great way to highlight your advantages and differentiation.
#3. The word that shall not be spoken.
Please don't describe your sales projections and market size as conservative.
90%of startups say, "Our projections are conservative."
You know what's true for 90% of startups? They miss their sales projections.
When a founder says conservative, they instantly reveal themselves
as someone who's never scaled a business. Here's why.
Building a business is hard.
Precisely because winning new customers is hard. Super hard.
The definition of a startup is a race against insolvency.
Most startups fail because they don't get meaningful traction
before running out of capital.
Describing sales projections as conservative makes you sound like a rookie
who assumes customers will just beat a path to your door.
So instead of calling projections conservative,
maybe you refer them as defendable or achievable.
Underestimating the difficulty of acquiring customers is a showstopper.
Instead, show projections derived from a detailed bottoms-up forecast.
Demonstrate a combination of humility when it comes to ramping sales,
but confidence in your detailed plan
because it's based on pressure tested assumptions and data.
So that's it.
3 mistakes that are easy to fix to avoid a fast trip to the no bucket.
Let's summarize.
#1. No trendy buzzwords.
Using buzzwords elicits a collective investor eye roll.
#2. Don't use superlatives.
#3.
Don't underestimate the challenges of acquiring new customers
by calling your sales projections conservative.
We'll address 3 more easy to fix mistakes in Chapter 2 of this series.
So that's it, you're Dreamit Dose in about 5 minutes.
Please leave your questions in the comments section.
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See you next time.