Competitor Analysis Out Of Pitch Decks

Early-stage company founders should avoid including competitor charts and matrices in pitch decks.

Here’s why:

• Competitor analysis will consistently demonstrate that a startup’s product is better and more feature-rich than competitors, or they wouldn’t be creating the product and bringing it to market. The fact that competitor analysis shows every startup as a superior product is meaningless, especially for pre-seed and seed-stage startups seeking investment, because these companies are often pre-revenue and pre-product. A startup doesn’t need a competitive matrix that shows them as the undisputed feature champion, at a minimum, until the startup has a product being used by customers. A yet-to-be product will always out-feature existing products, but this fantasy is not reality. When a company has a sellable product, it becomes more appropriate for competitive comparisons. Still, even then, I recommend that founders not include glorified competitor matrices in pitch decks in an attempt to win a feature-by-feature beauty contest.
• Investors don’t invest in product features that are often the core of competitive analysis in early-stage company pitch decks unless the founder can connect a feature to an expressed and validated customer problem and value proposition. Investors invest in customer value, not product features. A chart…