Comment by jargon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jargon | Hacker News Reader

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None of these are competitive advantages that are the opposite of the suggestions from the previous post about things that are not competitive advantages.

There are plenty of people who are passionate about their startups, working in a team of talented people, with customers, and insider information.

If a company went to a VC and used these competitive advantages, they'd be shot down in a second. Imagine this scenario:

Hi, I'm jargon. I am really super passionate about this idea and it's in my knowledge domain, because I have retail store. I'm a programmer with a retail store who has this software that I wrote to help me manage my retail store. I got 5 other retail stores on my block to buy it because it is so awesome. No other company is going to be able to compete with it, because all I care about is retail store software. Plus, we got Donald Trump to market it for us!

What VC in their right mind would ever invest in something like that?

You're in a pretty sweet position if you can go to an investor and say:

1) I'm an expert in my target market.

2) I have a functional product deployed in a real environment.

3) I have five other customers lined up already.

You'd be sitting better than 95% of startups, even if The Donald isn't shilling for you.

In your italicized text, it was good up until "No other company is going to compete with it."

The point isn't that you have no competition, but that you have enough raw material to be competitive yourself.

The point isn't that you're guaranteeing success, but that since most pitches (that I see) don't include ANY of the advantages you just listed, those that DO have those advantages look a lot better at the outset.

Of course anyone can succeed, and many should try. But that's not how investors think; they think in terms of reducing risk, and things like past success and traction are ways of reducing risk.

If I could go into my investors with 5 signed contracts and an endorsement from somebody like Donald (assuming it was actually relevant to the product), I can guarantee they would be standing on their seats cheering.

Your pitch has outlined very real successes that are far more important to the success of the business than 15 slides of how cool your idea is.

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