In the previous chapter, we talked about the solution and how you’re painting a broad-view image of how your company is going to address the problem you’ve identified in the market. As we discussed, for some presentations, the solution is the same as the product, but I like to think of them as slightly different slices of the same pie. Whereas the “solution” is a broader vision for the problem space, the “product” is more specific; it speaks to the product or solution you are planning to present to your customers first.

When telling your product story, it’s crucial to keep in mind that—as with any business—your product might change over time. Or, put differently, your broader “solution” is the fabric of your business; it probably won’t change drastically over the lifetime of your company. Your product, however, is your current stab at how you’re going to present your solution to the world. Over the lifetime of your company, you will probably have a suite of products that are taking on the problem you are trying to solve.

To bring that into context, let me use the Microsoft Office suite as an example. The problem Office is solving is that businesses need to be able to make presentations (PowerPoint), keep track of their finances (Excel), and create documents (Word). The overall “solution” that Microsoft was offering in this space was ways of making your business better and easier to use. Over the years, the Office suite has contained several products that were since retired. Microsoft Encarta was an encyclopedia, Microsoft Money was a personal finance tracking software package, and Microsoft Schedule was an application for scheduling, for example. Overall, the problem Office kept solving was consistent (“Make life easier for office workers”), but the products that were part of the suite kept evolving—and whole product lines were added, and discontinued, to stay on mission.

For a startup, it would be unwise to go after the entire Office suite as a whole. Microsoft has a tremendous foothold in that universe. It is unlikely that you’ll be able to offer an end-to-end solution that is better than what Microsoft is offering. However, it isn’t unthinkable that you might be able to come up with a product that is an excellent competitor to one of the apps in the Office suite. Airtable, for example, can be used as a spreadsheet—but it adds incredibly powerful functionality that makes it much better than Excel for specific use cases. There are a ton of alternatives to PowerPoint for presentations. And while my publisher, Apress, wants my manuscript as a Word document, I am writing this book in Grammarly (see Grammarly.com), because I enjoy the real-time spellcheck and grammar advice far better than Microsoft Word can offer.

Think of your “solution” slide as the Microsoft Office of your market. What suite of products can you offer to help solve several problems for your customers? That’s your longer-term goal. For your product slide, you are describing the “thin edge of the wedge.” What product do you need to offer to your customers to provide real value and get your foot in the door?

I recommend that my clients start the narrative with the solution. Imagining for a moment that MS Office didn’t exist, the solution pitch might be this: “In the office software space, customers have a wide span of needs. There is an opportunity for creating a suite of closely interlinked products that help office workers be more productive.” From there, you can tackle the product. “In time, we plan to address the full breadth of customer needs. We are starting by tackling the most important problem; accountants need to tabulate budgets manually. We can save them hundreds of hours and a huge amount of unnecessary mistakes.”

By structuring the narrative this way, you can help your potential investors buy into your big-picture vision and take a more detail-oriented approach next. This has two advantages: for one, if they get the big idea for what you are trying to do, you’re laying the groundwork for them dreaming big about your potential exit and, in turn, their fund-returning payday. It also helps contextualize what you are hoping to accomplish and aids in showing that you are the kind of founder who can think both at the macro- and microlevel. The second significant advantage is that even if they don’t fully agree with how you are tackling the market first—say, that you are trying to take on Office by tackling Excel first, but they would prefer you overthrow Word first—they can see the direction you are going. If you can make a compelling case for your first product and how it is of strategic importance for the second phase of your product rollout, it shows that you can think about a product road map dynamically.

Whatever you do, don’t pitch a full suite of products to early-stage investors. Even if the products are tightly integrated, it is usually better to bring one product to market first and learn from the launch and customer feedback before you launch your second product. In our BeerSub.com example (see Figure 7-1), we are starting by tackling a pretty simple slice of the market; you could imagine that the company will continue to grow into other market segments (wine, kombucha, perhaps even soft drinks) that can dispense out of the same taps. But starting with just beer is an easy way to test the market.

I see a lot of pitches where startups are planning to launch two, three, or sometimes even more products at once. The risk is too high. In the history of startups, there hasn’t been a product that found the perfect product/market fit from its launch; there are always learnings and adjustments that need to happen to find your stride. One of the advantages of being a founder is being nimble—you may as well keep that advantage for as long as you can.

A common mistake is to get the audience wrong for your product slide. By now, you’re probably used to selling your product to your customers. It is natural to have a temptation to pitch your product slide as if your investors are potential buyers. That doesn’t work: your investors don’t inherently care about your product, and even if they are personally interested in buying it, the investor deck is not the right place to do that. The “product” the investors are “buying” is ownership in your company, not the products or solutions you sell. Instead, think of your product slide as a compelling reason to invest. The product slide, then, should bolster the argument for investing, not sell the product itself. Tell the story of how your product fits into the overall solution. Explain how the product is an excellent fit for customers. Contextualize that with the market dynamics in your industry.

As a founder, you spend a lot of your time creating compelling products. You are rightfully proud of the work your company has done to date, and your milestones are worth celebrating. It may be tempting to lead with your product slide to tell the story of your company, but that’s almost always the wrong decision. If you have traction, that’s a better slide to lead with—and if your product is magnificent, contextualize it with your bigger vision (the “solution” slide), rather than waxing lyrical about the product itself.