The Premise: Pitching a startup idea or a company to investors using the Pitch Deck.One slide, in particular, is given the same feedback by a venture capitalist across a bunch of founders: Competition.Why competitor slides are often less than ideal is because founders are experts of their companies and users (or at least they should be), but often are not experts in their competitors. But they spend the same amount of time structuring this slide as every other slide.

The Problem With A Slide In The Pitch Deck

The headline of the competitor slide is how your company has meaningful, defendable differentiation. We sometimes call this the moat, which needs to follow at least three principles:<ul><li>Prove that your company has defendable differences from competitors.</li><li>Prove why these are THE differentiators that’ll make your company a winner.</li><li>Prove you are accurately portraying the information above.</li></ul>

The Ideal Competitor Slide

The first principle is easy. You need to provide how your company is different from everyone else. Most companies can get this far. This comes primarily in a mix of two flavours:(1) How our solution is different (unique insight) or (2) How our execution is different (<a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6e-how-to-evaluate-startup-ideas">unfair advantage</a>).Recommendation: Go beyond the easy step.

The First Principle

<ul><li>Founders lose credibility because they purposely or inadvertently downplay their competitors.</li><li>Spend the time thinking deeply about your unique insights and unfair advantages. It’s very possible you don’t have it. This step will not only help you raise, but also increase your chances of building a successful startup.</li><li>Think and communicate in terms of trade-offs. Your competitors are not dumb. Why did they choose one model over another? What are the trade-offs? And why did you choose this trade-off that positions you to win. It needs to relate back to your core messages.</li></ul>

Advice To Follow

<ul><li>Founders "straw-man" competitors, replacing the product of competitors with more convenient ones from which to differentiate.</li><li>Excluding real competitors, and only share competitors that are easy to differentiate.</li><li>This happens when they are living in denial, and even claim that they don't have any competitors, which is always an illusion.</li></ul>

Straw-Manning

Over the last few years, I’ve provided feedback to my friends and colleagues on their pitch decks. As a former venture capitalist, I’ve probably seen a few hundred pitch decks, and built a few, now…

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