Investor pitch and customer pitch require separate approaches

Executive overview

Founders routinely use the same pitch for customers and investors — it fails for both. Customers know the problem intimately; investors often don't have the problem at all. A customer pitch uses industry jargon and digs into product specifics. An investor pitch strips jargon, avoids marketing language, and focuses on business fundamentals.

The pitch that wins customers will confuse investors, and vice versa.

Customer pitch principles

• Use industry jargon — it builds credibility with domain-familiar buyers
• Get the customer talking more than you; they should describe their own problem
• Focus on how the solution helps them personally, as quickly as possible
• Goes into product specifics: functionality, onboarding, pricing for their situation
• Appropriate for sales calls, website copy, user interviews, FAQs

Investor pitch principles

• Strip all jargon — assume the investor has never experienced your problem
• Cut marketing language ("platform", "first-ever", "most unique") — it's noise investors must filter out
• Describe what you do in the simplest possible terms, with a concrete example
• A Google pitch that says "organises the world's information" means nothing to someone who doesn't already know Google; explaining the search box, Enter key, and ranked results does

The six things investors want to know

1. What do you do — in the simplest language possible
2. How far along are you — idea, building, launched, customers, growth
3. How large is the total addressable market
4. How do you plan to charge users
5. What do you know about this market that competitors don't
6. Who are the founders, and can they actually build the product

When the rule bends

• Mass-market consumer products (Yelp, Uber) — investor pitch can resemble the customer pitch, because the investor is also a potential user
• If your website front page and pitch deck say the same thing, and you're not building a mass-market consumer product, something is wrong
• YC founders typically take a full month of practice before they stop conflating the two pitches