# How pitching investors is different than pitching customers

**Author:** Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/7u-how-pitching-investors-is-different-than-pitching-customers
**YouTube ID:** pQnOBHNKlgs

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Y Combinator Partner Michael Seibel on pitching customers vs pitching investors.

## Transcript

although I'm Michael Seibel and partner Y Combinator today I'd like to talk about the difference between your investor pitch and your customer pitch when most founders typically screw up here is that your customer typically knows a lot about the problem that you're trying to solve and is extremely personally interested in the solution that you have whereas the investor might not have the problem that you're trying to solve at all and might be only interested in the solution in so much as they think it can build a big company what this means is that the same pitch

often doesn't work for these two communities so when you're talking to a customer one of the ways that you build credibility is that you use jargon you use the language of the industry another thing that you do is you try to get them to speak a lot about the problem that they have you want them to be talking more than you and then the third thing is that you try to figure out how the solution can help them personally as soon as possible when you think about where to use this customer pitch it can

be on a sales call if you have the front page of your website you can be in your to do your help here FAQ it can be in user interviews a lot of the language is really relevant to their on the other hand when you're talking to an investor unless you're pitching a consumer product that you're pretty sure that they'd want to use you have to assume that they don't really understand the problem in this situation jargon is actually going to hurt you it's not going to help you so you want to make sure your pitch is jargon free in addition what you want to do is make sure that you're using language that

they can understand oftentimes people will incorporate you know flowery language so we're building a a platform or this is like the first thing ever done it's the most unique thing ever what I call marketing language marketing language unfortunately is fluff that an investor has to filter out to understand what you really are trying to do the best example I give about this is pitching Google imagine if I was pitching Google and I said ogle organizes the world's information for an investor that's actually not telling them anything if they understood what

Google did already then sure they'll be great but if they don't really understand what Google does that doesn't tell them anything it doesn't create any picture in there a much better pitch for Google is to say Google's a new type of search engine with Google you actually go to our website you type what you want to know into a search box you click enter and we report in an ordered list websites that we think can help you with the information you're looking for what makes people different is that those websites are ranked by how other websites link to them and so those

results are way more relevant that is something that people can understand even if they don't use a search engine that is something that people can understand when they don't know any of the jargon of your industry and so you have to really really careful when you're thinking about an investor pitch your investor pitch is probably not something you want to put on your website it's probably not something that feels comfortable you're talking to a customer it's something that really is only typically reserved for your pitch deck if your front page of your website and your pitch deck are saying the same

thing and you don't have a product where you assume the customer is also a user a product like Yelp or uber you might be doing it wrong so an investor pitch typically the investor is curious about is one what do you do when the simplest language possible to how far along are you just idea phase are you building the product have you launched the product you have customers deep growth 3 how big of a total addressable market you think you're addressing for how do you plan to

charge your users 5 what do you think you know about this market that other people or competitors don't understand and 6 who's on your team specifically who are the founders more specifically do you have the ability to build the product that you are trying to bring to market so those things are what the investor is really interested in as opposed to the customer where customer often doesn't really care about at least half of those things the customer

certainly cares how much you're charging and they certainly care about what you're doing but they're actually probably far more interested in like what the functionality of what you're doing is what the onboarding process is like specifically how the pricing applies to them specifically does it solve their specific problems versus like maybe some more general problem and so in a customer conversation you end up getting into a lot of interesting nitty-gritty nough Soprano bring up screenshots you actually let me do a live demo in an investor conversation

more often than not you're really getting to the nitty-gritty about the business about how big the market is but their customers actually want to buy this product what their demand level is how many customers there are potentially for this product all of those types of things are on the business and less getting into screenshots and demos and so and so forth of course certain exceptions in all sides I would certainly say that like mass-market consumer products the investor pitch looks a little bit more like the customer pitch but for most companies that are going through YC we have to split these up we have to kind of teach

founders that just going one to one investor pitch customer pitch is not the way to do it interestingly enough it takes them some practice within the first month YC founders are still trying to figure out how to meld their customer pitch in their investor pitch only after kind of constant trying do we convince them it's better just to have two separate pitches so in summary the customer pitch in the investor pitch are to two very different things the investor is trying to understand can you build a big business the customer is

trying to understand does your product solved their specific problem because there are two different motivations for these two different audiences most likely you're going to need two different pitches so that's one thing that you should focus on even at the early stage of your company you
