pitchWe are going to participate in a startup contest with a product we are building, a versatile educational platform that can be applied in a lot of different areas. Particularly we are now creating three products based on this platform: a math course, a languages course and a humanities course. They all are so different that they don’t seem to be running on the same platform.
In this contest, they request us a detailed description of the project but with a very limited text length. We are not able to describe the platform and all the courses we are building in depth. So we have the following options:
1.- Describe the platform and not the courses, so we wouldn’t show the products that we are really launching
2.- Describe superficially only the three launching courses, so we wouldn’t show the platform and its versatility
3.- Describe the platform and the courses but very superficially, so we would show almost nothing
Note that in all cases we have also to show a market study, propects, business model, etc.
How would you pitch a product like this, that can have very different types of applications and customers, in a startup contest or to VC?
What would it be better: focus or scalability/versatility?
For a startup Focus is key. Get it working for one specific niche example, get some kind of cash flow and then branch out.
Instead of 3 courses, try to understand which course would create the most value for your customers with the least work from your perspective and do that one first in depth.
For example - maybe ‘math’ might be the focus: easier to recruit math users than humanities? easy to automate marking and give quick feedback…
The platform is a means to enable cheap scaling, from a customer perspective I don’t really care too much about the platform as long as things work for me. It might be a mistake to over-invest in the platform before you’ve validated your product-market fit for at least a couple of different courses.
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