I just started in on the Kauffman Foundation’s TechVenture program, being facilitated by Steve Morris at OTBC to about 10 of us entrepreneurs. This was the first session, with a really useful focus: why, not what — at least that’s how I digested it. I’ll try to record my learnings here from the class over the next few months. There was a nice lecture from a source I’ll keep anonymous; details are irrelevant for this. It was the long personal story of a 12-year business experience, summed up into a single lesson: we shouldn’t be focusing on what we build, but rather on why it benefits customers.
More concretely, it’s really easy for entrepreneurs — particularly developers — to fall into the trap of focusing on what their product does. This gets reflected in presentations and messages, and ultimately in the shape of the product. For example, in my case I could be saying that uGraph is a technology stack that does round-the-clock data mining, processing, and analytics to produce novel, real-time visualizations about health. But that tells nothing about why the product is compelling to customers. I’ve made that mistake, almost so blatantly. The why message should be more like: Our product enables medical detectives to understand sickness so that they can detect and avoid it. (That’s a bit simplistic, but at least the right emphasis.) Focusing on the why seems pretty obvious now, right? Wonder why nearly all of the recent 30 elevator pitches I’ve heard have been what-focused. Maybe it’s not so obvious.
That brings up the next point: who. As we started working through elevator pitches, we had some confusion about who our customers are. For many at this stage it’s hard to exclude any potential markets. But there needs to be a focus on a near-single customer; not the world at large. Of course our technologies can be tailored or generalized for various markets. It’s hard to throw out so many opportunities, but the bottom line is that we need to narrow in on a specific customer, or at least differentiate for disparate groups. We still have a few potential markets since we’re still testing the waters, but now I’m simply lumping them all into a “medical detective” class, which I now define as Epidemiologists. It turns out that a lot of types of end-users (news companies and sickos) would like to wear Amateur Epidemiologist hats, and we’ll target them too (though most may not even know what epidemiology is). We are now building Epidemiological visualizations — that’s pretty specific. This narrowing really helps to simplify my elevator pitch (which we’ll work more on next week), and really the grand vision (which may be different next week 
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With that in mind, I’ll expand our who and why to: We provide tools the CDC uses to immediately see an illness spread and take necessary action, or what the news companies use to captivate their audience so they stick around through the next commercial, or what end-users use to avoid getting sick and understand why they’ve been sick. The why is now addressing the real needs/pain points of our actual who: customers.
Tags: customers, elevator pitch, entrepreneurship