📍 Have you ever had an idea for a physical product that you just knew had the potential to change the world? Maybe it was something you dreamt up in your garage or a solution to a problem you encountered in your daily life. Whatever it was, you knew it was a winner. If only you can turn that idea into something... Well, you are not 📍 alone! Countless entrepreneurs and innovators have stood exactly where you stand filled with passion and drive, but unsure of where to begin, and that's where "The Builder Circle" comes in. My name is Sera Evcimen and I'm a mechanical engineer, hardware enthusiast, and hardware mentor. I've had the privilege of working with numerous hardware companies that are passionate about solving some of the biggest challenges in the world. And I will be your host as we explore the exciting and complex world of physical product development. Hello there and welcome to the builder circle. On today's episode, we'll be diving into how to write a successful pitch with Haje Kamps. We all know hardware's hard and sometimes telling the story of how a hardware product will come to life is even harder. Haje is an experienced entrepreneur and pitch coach and Him and I will discuss three things. You, as the builder should think through when creating your pitch deck. How to approach the product development process and the first place so that the pitch works to raise a fund and common pitfalls to avoid. As per usual, if you don't have time to listen to the full episode, I've taken the Liberty to extract key takeaways and actionable bits from the talk and put it in our T LDL too long. Didn't listen segment at the end of the episode 📍 so that you can walk away with some important insights. And when you have the time, you can always come back and listen to the full episode. Without further ado, I leave you with Haje Welcome to the Builder Circle. Today I have Haje Kamps with me. Yeah. Hi. Good to meet you again. I'm so excited to have you on today. We're gonna be talking about technical pitching , which is really important because a lot of hardware companies and software companies, anyone that's deeply technical sometimes struggle with providing a, a good storyline to not only introduce their technology, but also find a good kind of product market fit for it through the pitch. So Haje, if you could give a little bit of background to our listeners so that they know who they're listening to. Yeah, hello. I have the world weirdest background. I think I I ended up doing a journalism degree and swore off journalism for life and now I work as a journalist, so it's like I can never quite seem to pick a direction, but I think my main My main kind of thread through all of this entrepreneurship. I started my first company when I was very, very young. I sold my first company at 17, which later evolved into like one of the, one of the biggest photography news sites in Norway. I ended up writing a whole bunch of books about photography. I think I'm, I've done about 20 plus a whole, whole bunch of ghost written books. And yeah, then I ended up in venture capital for a bit and really I worked as the director of portfolio and so I was working with a portfolio of 70, 80 companies. And it was fascinating. Suddenly I had like an inside look into what happens in 70 companies, which is such a beautiful gift because I learned a lot about, A lot of the same problems and challenges show up in companies, but the way you solve them could be drastically different, even if the problem is very similar. Which of course is based on the resources you have available, right? Some, some teams have, are really, really strong at solving problems. One way. Some teams are very strong at solving problems another way, and what I learned is that, even though one solution wor works in one company, it doesn't necessarily have to be the same in another company. I also started five or six companies myself, so. And one was a hardware company that ended up, goodness, I'm sure we'll get back to that later. In any case, it didn't go super well. It ran for seven years, which is exciting. We shipped lots and lots of products, which is also exciting, but we relied on the wrong people for advice and it cost us the company, which was, Mm. an interesting one. And these days I I work as a pitch coach, so basically I help people. How to tell their stories, mostly to VCs. But you know, it turns out storytelling is a pretty transferable skill. And so I work with early stage founders on that topic in lots of different ways. It's incredibly important and I think that the work that you do is Critical for technologies to survive the kind of conception phase. And I think your background actually lines up very well having been on the other side of the, the table and understanding what VCs look for and like, potentially have difficulty understanding having that level of empathy is so crucial and it's not obvious. So, Super excited to talk about this topic with you and get your thoughts on it, and I'm sure you have many, many so first, let's, let's start with the basics. My, my cynical side always takes over because a lot of engineers, a lot of technologists are so entrenched with the work that they do, and they see the problem that they're solving and they're like, it's obvious to them, right? I mean, if it wasn't obvious then. You wouldn't start a company. And so I, I wanna get your take on the importance of a good pitch. So basically answering the question of why should builders care about their pitch? Shouldn't the technology stand for itself? I feel like that's an angle that a lot of people potentially take and don't spend time perfecting their pitch. So I'd love to get your thoughts. Well, we can start there. I think the technology very rarely speaks for itself. If it did, Betamax would've beaten VHS. HD DVD would've beaten Blu-ray. There's engine technologies where you're like, why isn't this more of a, like, there are so many technologies that are objectively better in every possible way that somehow didn't win. Mm-hmm. The other big fallacy that people have is like, oh, I'm the first person to ever do this. We have first move mover advantage. And I'm just like, friend, that doesn't exist. Google was the 26th search engine. Right? Facebook was definitely not the first social network and is now dominating everything. Mm-hmm. And it's an interesting thing. I think kinda simul simultaneous invention is a thing that exists almost everywhere, like every single time they hand out a Nobel Award. So, In or in no Nobel Prize in physics or chemistry or what have you, as soon as it's awarded, it turns out that there's six or seven other teams around the world working on exactly the same thing, in exactly the same way. And I think the reason that happens is that you don't do anything in a vacuum, right? The fact that you had this idea meant that something in the universe was ripe for that idea to happen. Yep. The example I always use is consumer grade drones, right? We had in the eighties and seventies and eighties, you could fly a, a model helicopter. You could tie a camera to it, so you could do everything a drone could. But then mobile phones started happening, right? Mobile phones happened, which meant accelerometers, gps, cheap radios, miniaturization, the accessibility of all these components and lots of documentation, right? People were building mobile phones, left, right, and center, and so all these components, And the way to tie 'em together suddenly became cheap and easily available, which unlocked consumer drones. And people don't really go look three years before the mobile phone. You could build an equivalent, but it would be extremely hard, very expensive, and most kind of amateur electronics nerds wouldn't be able to build one. Now. Any platform, right? Any sort of electronics development platform, a couple of motors, and you can build yourself a, a quad copter drone. And I think those huge energy or I guess energetic shifts as well, but technology shifts out there mean that what you are building, somebody else is also building. And so the story behind, like skipping to the end of the, of the story here, but. Early stage investors really look for three things. The first one is, do you have founder market fit? Like is there something about you that inherently makes you the right founder to build this company? And what that usually means is have you, do you have a PhD or have you worked on this for like 30 years? Or do does your little black book, your little Rolodex, or whatever people use these days, that is technologically. Appropriate. Does that have basically every single buyer in this entire industry in your phone, right? If you have one of those things, that probably means you have a better founder market fit, that somebody goes, this is, this is annoying. This is like, I need to fix this problem. There's a couple of places where this shows up particularly loudly in my experience in venture capital, right? This happens when a technologist has a baby, for example, and they go like, parenting is terrible. These the way you clean these bottles are terrible. The way you do this is terrible. Diapers are, diapers are terrible, and they go and scratch their own itch, right? They go and come up with technological solutions to build an autoclave for baby bottles or what have Mm-hmm. The problem is they run out of steam when the baby. Becomes three or four, and they don't drink outta those bottles anymore. Suddenly that product isn't as exciting anymore. And so while you have product market fit, i e, you are an engineer and you have a baby, but you don't have product market fit, i e, you're not a pediatrician. You're not somebody who spends 20 years looking and thinking about what this problem actually looks. So I think that's a really big and important thing to have in mind. Like even if you're very, very smart and even if you have lots of skills, and even if you have a very, very good idea. Are you going to be able to do a 10 year uphill slog of building this company? And the truth, the truthful answer for most people is no. And there's no shame in that, right? You can make really good money working at a bigger company or letting somebody else take all the risk. I, the second big thing that people stumble over all the time is, is this venture scale. And to explain that, one, you have to think about what a venture capitalist does. a general partner, a gp, and a venture firm is somebody who invests money into startups. But you have to think about why. Mm-hmm. The why is they have raised money from an LP Limited partner that tends to be a person who's sitting on a huge wad of cash, but they're doing that not because they happen to have a lot of cash laying around. They do that because they are, I don't know, a university endowment or a pension fund or a, a huge pot of money. And they take a tiny slice of that pot of money and use that as a simply ga, essentially gambling chips, right? So they might invest in crypto, they might invest in the housing market, they might invest in something high risk. And the hope is that the return of that at least beats inflation. Cuz otherwise, if you have a hundred billion dollar party, you just sit on it, it reduces in value by whatever inflation is every year. You can't have that, right? You need to have the money around. Mm-hmm. And so when you think about it that way, it means that you are raising money from somebody who has a portfolio approach. So your, your venture capitalist will make 20 to 30 investments in, in whatever their investment thesis is, and they have a very strict fiduciary responsibility to the people who gave them money. So while it seems really rock and roll and really sexy to be a venture capitalist, you're actually kind of the, the cool kids in a very, very boring FinTech universe. But that affects how people invest, right? Even if you as a founder are super happy, if you walk away with 10 million at the end, your investors may actually be really angry because if they put a million in and they get 2 million back, you might go, well, you got to two x. Well, for them, for the entire portfolio, to make sense, half of it is gonna go to zero, right? Half the investments are gonna be essentially worthless. So that means that all the other ones have to be at least two x. So for you to have a two x return, That isn't actually great. That only makes up for one failure, and there's probably gonna be many failures in that portfolio. And so the, what I mean by VC scale is that your company needs to have at least an opportunity, a chance, a possibility of if everything goes to plan. If you fire on all cylinders, the market reacts well, the product goes great, everything's amazing. You need to be able to offer a 10 to 50 time return. Yeah. And if that ev if, like, even if in your wildest dream, that doesn't happen on paper. That means that a friend, it's just not VC investible. You don't fit with the kind of money you're trying to raise. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea. You can build a lifestyle business, you can raise money from a bank, you can do a small angel round, whatever, and then build on have done. and with great success, right? There's many people who, in fact, I have so much grief about my, my little hardware company. If we had just not gotten greedy and just churned away, it would be around still today. Making and for the most, most of its life, it was churning a very nice little profit. But we were like, ah, startups raise money, go big. And that's what ended up burning us. Interesting. And so you said two, what's the third one? Bottom market fit. Oh VC returnable. And that's tied to market size. Mm-hmm. So, is the size of the market you're going after sufficiently big to make a venture return even possible. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I guess kind of a, a for a fourth in there is like, is anybody willing to pay for this solution? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I see a lot of people who, who build something really, really cool. Like I, I am, I'm surrounded with engineers and hardware folk, right? People buy, build cool stuff in their houses all the time, and even though something is really cool and really helpful and really useful, doesn't mean it makes a great product. It doesn't mean that you have a market. That actually wants this thing. definitely. Yeah. I, I see that often in companies that do things like car accessories. Like if you build a really cool spoiler for a Honda Civic, good on you. You might be able to sell a bunch of them, but you're probably never going to sell in, sell enough to be this scale that this is VC investible. That's cool. That's fine. That's okay. But keep a very close eye on your market size because you're really talking about an asset class here. Venture capital that. That needs to see huge, huge, huge returns. I see. So it's almost like you're talking about the meta question of you really need to do a lot of, I guess, soul searching and understanding who you're ever going to pitch to in the first place. Like it's, it's like, is your company like suited for a specific type of investment or like a specific type of pathway? And then that's going to also determine how you're going to tell your storyline and what your storyline is even going to be. Yeah, so when I work with pitch coaching clients, I have like a 20 minute introduction call with people, and I always tell people I have red flags and I have yellow flags. Red flags are looked, unless you fix this, you are never going to raise money. Mm-hmm. And the sad truth is some of those things just aren't fixable. Mm Right? Somebody's trying to build a company in a space that it just doesn't make sense. We, we cannot make the numbers make sense on paper. mm Yeah. The story isn't writing itself basically, well, it's not that There's no story to be told Yeah, exactly. On the very fundamental level. You're like, I am going to scoop CO2 out of the air and turn it into gold. I was like, that sounds like a great idea, and physics is in your way. It's literally impossible. Luckily, that kind of thing shows up very rarely. But what does happen is that somebody comes to me and says, okay, I'm gonna build this hardware company. I've got this co-founder team with a really good like, Systems engineering background, really good. This, that and the other. And I'm like, okay, there's nobody on your team who actually knows anything about making hardware. You go, oh yeah, no, we'll just outsource that. It's like, no, you won't. you won't. Because yes, you should outsource some of this for sure. You can't do everything yourself, but you need somebody on the team who knows whether or not you're being somebody's trying to pull the wool over your eyes or to understand what QA looks like or to understand the many, many steps you have to go through, between prototype and. A box on a, on a, on a target shelf, Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So those are red flags. Or similarly, if you're trying to do a B2C company or a, sorry, a direct to consumer company, like, like any of the subscription boxes you hear about all the Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. don't have core marketing stuff on, on, on your team, like, well, I'm sorry, you're building a marketing company. You don't have marketing skills. Nobody in their right mind is gonna give you money. Even if it's the best thing in the world, if, if people don't hear about it, they're, it's not gonna, it's not gonna take off. and the only antidote to any of this, I tell people this all the time, is traction. Like it doesn't matter if your team is utter garbage if you're selling these things like hotcakes, it's like, well, You figured it out somehow, right? If you have no marketing team and you have no marketing plan, but somehow you're, you're, you're, you're increasing 15% week on week. Sure. happen. it could, it does happen. This is the crazy thing. If you have traction, you have a company then, and if you have traction that grows sufficiently and you can prove that the market size is big enough so you have something to grow into, you're gonna raise money. Right? Like I, I've actually had one, I had one pitch coaching client at one point who like, I think 30 slides in, he showed me the traction and I was like, wait, is this real? Is this right? He goes, yeah, look. How do you do this? Like, well, we found four different customer acquisition channels that worked really, really well, and then we kept tweaking them and, and now it costs us almost nothing to acquire customers. We take all the money we make of those customers and plow it back into marketing, and so we have a flywheel and it just keeps going faster and faster. I was like, okay, we have 30 slides. Let's delete 29 of them. You really only, we only need this traction slide. Hello. We are this and this, and we do that. This is our traction. We need 15 million to double this traction. That's the whole pitch. You don't have to tell anybody about who you are, how you do it, what you figured out, and that that'll come out in due diligence. But at the end of those three steps, the investor will just give you money because you've figured it out. Yeah. Interesting. And so that actually dovetails it. I, I feel like you've talked through this already, but what, what do you feel like are the, the common mistakes that people make in their pitches? Earlier this week on Monday, I delivered a, a pitch called 10 Mistakes People Make In, in in Pitching to VCs and all about it in TechCrunch. read all about in Tech Crunched. Well this was actually a it was a really interesting talk. And mostly it's about the things that I've already talked about, right? Founder market fit. The other big one that gets to me is you have to think about why you're raising money. And I think this is actually the number one mistake people make. Like why are you raising money? And often people say, well, I need to extend my runway by 18 months. And I understand that that is important to you as a founder, but your investor will not give a crap, right? How long your runway is is like not interesting to them. What they wanna know is like, if you raise 3 million now and over the next X months, what milestones are you going to hit? What important things are you going to do? What hires are you going to make? What are the things that you are unlocking so you can raise the next round of funding? And so what I often challenge people to do is to put together an operating plan that says, look, right now we are here. When we get to here because we've raised 3 million and spent that money, does the company look ready for the next round? And if the answer is no, you're doing it wrong. Because at that point you're like running out of cash. But you don't have what the collateral, the, the investment collateral you need in order to raise the next round. It appears like a bandaid almost. It's just like, oh, we, we plan to do stuff. We, we we did our raise, we pitched what we're going to do, and then we didn't quite get there. And now everything is on fire, so we're trying to raise some, that's also like coming at it from such a low leverage too. Yeah, Or a mistake like we're talking about hardware here. A terrible mistake you could make here is like the end of your funding round gets you to an end of five, right? You've built five of something. Well, that isn't like unless you also did market research, unless you also knowed, you could sell this unless you have a BOM (Bill of Materials) cost or a yield or whatever it is that you need to convince this investor to turn on the factory. Mm-hmm. You've, you've basically just navigated yourself into, into a corner. You have five of your device, that's great, but five isn't enough to actually start selling. It probably isn't enough to raise money, right? You end up in this really awkward situation. So a better thing to do would be build 200, which is gonna be very, very expensive, and maybe you have to hand build it however you get it built. But if you can sell those 200 and get user feedback and do. Market research and say, Hey, we've sold 200. This is user feedback. This is the market research. We, we think we can sell 300,000 over the next three years. This is why suddenly the whole conversation shifts, because now, You haven't just done the engineering thing of like we was, we weren't sure if we could build this. We built this. Look, here's a prototype, but cool. Now you have a prototype that's not like that, that works if you're an intrapreneur, if you are backed by hp, whatever. If you're backed by a huge, like they can go, oh, we have a prototype. It looks great. Cool. Copy paste, built 10,000 of it, right? But that only works if you're backed with a huge bag of money to begin with. If you are a little startup, that's a really ugly place to be. So, Think about like if you execute a plan and if you delivered the milestones. And I'm a really, really strong proponent of having smart milestones so you can actually measure and make it relevant and all that kind of thing. But if you deliver on all that the company looks like, you think it's going to look like, is that, like, can you put all of that on the next slide deck and say, Hey, I'm here raising 50 million, 20 million because I know what's going to happen next. And so the, the exercise there is really to think about two funding rounds in one. You don't have to get to the end of the second funding round, but you have to get to the beginning of it. Do you have everything you need to raise your next round of money If everything goes to plan? And if the answer is no, your plan is wrong or you're not raising enough money, I love that. I mean, it's, I, I'm really, really happy that this conversation is turning into like, honestly the big background work that needs to get into a point where you are even qualified to pitch. Your company and because you, you have to have material to work with. It's like unless you're an unethical person and you're lying, which do not do does also happens, but try not to, people go to, people today, went to prison for 11 years over that kind of thing. Yeah, so don't do that. Definitely do not do that. We do not recommend that. But it's, I mean, I, I, I do technical program management, so you're speaking my language when you say smart milestones, and I think it's, it's, I mean, it, it all ties together. I mean, once you have your operations in, in place and you have a plan, you can, you should be able to articulate it in your pitch and it should scratch the correct itches with with VCs. I really. You said it in such a concise way of, just don't think about the end of your next fundraising. Think about the beginning. That's, I think that's where it's at. It's just like, where am I, where am I trying to go? What will this next round unlock is fine, but this is where I'm at and this is why I'm stopping and I can't go further if I don't do this. Yep. Yeah, and I think, I mean, I, I, it's interesting we're talking about pitching really, but these are the red flags, which means you're not ready to pitch. yeah. So assuming you've got all of this out of the way, and I, the reason I start with this is often when I do my 20 minute exploratory call, I, I turned, I turned a pitch coaching client down. Yeah. Hey like I am very, very good at what I do and I am not gonna be enough for you to raise money. It's a very hard thing for people to hear. Also, I'm just like, look, I'm, I'm on your team here. And it's like, I also work on a contingency basis. I take half payment upfront and half when they raise money, and I'm like, I want my second payment guys. I wanna make sure that I can help you to a degree that. You and with my best customers, right? I have a five week program. In week four, they're out in front of VCs and in week five they have term sheets. And in week six I get my second payment. It's like the best founders who really have everything stitched up and they just need, like, my favorite customer is somebody who is probably a deep nerd. Understands this market inside and out, has been in it for a super long time, understands everything about it, and really, really has like exquisite level of insights into both the problem space, the solution space, and the kind of the, the tech technology that is needed to build this company. So it's the, all the bits and pieces and they're like, I have 50,000 ideas and I don't know how to turn this into a narrative. I'm like, ah, my time to shine. Because then I can say, look, you, you have too many stories here. Let's pick one or two. Like all you need to do is to get to the next meeting you don't like in your first pitch. You're not gonna walk away with a signed check. You just need to get to the next meeting. You just need to, so you go to the first meeting, you convince 'em that you're a good idea. You go to the partner meeting, you're convinced the partnership that you're a good idea. Then you get through due diligence, and then you get your check. There's a little bit negotiating and a little bit of all that kind of stuff in there. First. But it's a pretty straightforward process, right? It's not rocket science but it's storytelling, which for some people who, especially rocket scientists, in fact, can be really, really hard. And when you have that first conversation so you said that you basically tried to understand. How they do internal, like operational planning where they're at, probably like technological readiness level wise and what they're like, almost like, because you understand hardware, you probably ask a little bit about like what their strategy is and like how, how they've gone about it. And both on the market side and the investability side and also the technical side. Are there any other questions you ask that like, help you get those red flags or what's the problem you're solving and who is experiencing this problem? That's number one. Right? Well, it's important, right? And then the next one is how. are you making? Right, and how are they currently solving this problem? Occasionally you get like, oh, this problem is experienced by every single car mechanic in the world. Great. That's a big market. It is this and this problem. It's like, okay, that's a great problem. How are they currently solving it? They use a hammer. It's like, okay, well, is there a problem with using a hammer? Right. Right? It's like, yes, there's a problem here. Yes, maybe a different tool would be better, but if there was a zero cost, zero effort way of. Of solving this. I, I used to have an old mini and I used to have to deal with my car and stuff, broken it all the time, right. And occasionally I was like, I wish there was a better way of doing this. But people who restore classic cars will just put elbow grease and time into it. Yes, you could do this more efficiently, but elbow grease and time gets you there most of the time, especially with old cars. And I think this is kind of the, the parable, right? It's like if you are solving a problem that lots of people experience, but there's not really a pain point, like people aren't really willing to spend, like maybe there's already a different tool out there that is inferior to yours, but people aren't buying that one either because they're like, eh, it takes me five minutes longer, but whatever. I'll, I'll grab a cup of coffee and I'll listen to some music and I'll spend the five minutes to fix this thing fixing pro. So what's the problem? Who's experiencing this and how are they currently paying for it or how, how are they currently solving it is really important to get to it. Then my usual next question is, what is your solution? And that is different from the product. Really important. So the solution is something that a company will probably never pivot on. Like if you are building a. AI auto dialing robots to do, to get in touch with people like that is a, that is an implementation of something. The problem is a, how do you dial a hundred people an hour? The solution is some sort of autodialer, right? The specific, specific, specific implementation of that autodialer is your product, and as a company you can pivot on product, but you're probably not going to pivot on solution. If you pivot on solution, that probably means you're doing a whole new company. Yeah. So, And there are many, many different ways of solving a problem, right? For almost every single problem, there's five or six different solutions. And if you're talking to engineers, there's probably 12 solutions cuz people love coming up with creative, fun, innovative solutions to things. So in the narrative of like, who's experienced a problem? What is the solution? What is your product specifically right now? Like, what is the snapshot right now and what is the next three iterations of that product? So you're talking a little bit about a timeline in that little ball that will box. You get a really good like product market view. Then the next conversation I tend to have to figure out whether or not it's viable is like, who do you think your audience is and how big is that market? Yeah. It's a different slice into the same thing. And then, the, this often comes up pretty clearly. It was like, why are you the right person to solve this problem? Yeah. And this is the founder market fit thing. And people often get very upset with me about that. And maybe I need to come up with better language around it. But my truth, and they think that I know to be absolutely 100% true, is that if you are an investor and a good idea comes in the door, That same good idea will come five more times that year, and one of them will be by somebody who just dropped out of Facebook and was bored. One of them will come out of somebody who just came out of university and came up with an interesting way of solving this. And then there's a PhD and then there's somebody who was the VP of marketing at the biggest competitor company, and then there's the, and so. Like you are not just competing with the market, you're also competing with everybody else who's trying to solve something in this market. And if you can't, if your team isn't your moat, then as an investor I'm like, why should I give you money? I can go out there, like I can call a university professor right now and say, Hey, there's something interesting happening in mRNA vaccines. Who's building companies in this space and they go, oh, well there's this team, there's that team, there's this team. I go and call them all like, Hey, what are you working on? Do you need money? What does this look like? Like if I'm convinced there's a huge market and a huge opportunity, I'm not gonna necessarily just invest in in the first person who comes in through the door. I'm going to invest in the best possible team that gives me and my, my LPs. This is back to the fiduciary responsibility piece. I'm gonna back the team that has the biggest opportunity. And this comes up all the time. Right. A famous example is Sequoia. They knew that there was going to be some sort of upheaval in the, in the hotel market cuz hotels were very inefficient and not working. They kept half an eye on, on Lyft and were like, huh, there's something happening when people are sharing their stuff. Maybe there could be some sort of a car share or like for car sharing, but for houses that could come up. They looked at so many companies before they eventually backed Airbnb, which is now, the company to beat in this space. But they didn't back Airbnb by accident. And because the founders were amazing. Sure, the founders were amazing, but they were actively out there looking for something in that space. And so as a founder, you have to think about that, right? Like it doesn't matter that you found an enormous product. It doesn't even matter that you build a really good solution. If you are a really good solution. If Sony comes along and builds a good solution, they're probably gonna win cuz they're Sony. Yeah. So it's like, why are you the right person to do this? And if you're not, go do something else. Right? Chances of success if you are not the right person to build a particular company are vanishingly small. Yeah. So it goes back to that kind of self-assessment, self-validation, and also, I mean, this wasn't quite the, the focus of what you just said, but I, I did take away from it. Is that it's, it's really, really important to know where your audience is at on the scale of interest too. Because , if they got connected to you through like a professor or something, like there's, there's clear, like emotive and in, in interest in them and in the field that you're in. So the stuff that you would need to convince 📍 them. Of is going to be different and being able to clearly lay that out is important. Podcast Break This podcast is presented to you by Pratik, a startup advising and coaching company that is geared to help hardware entrepreneurs get their ideas from a napkin sketch into a lab and out into the world. So I'm gonna do a quick podcast, break into a little segment and then we'll go get right back into it. Is just a hardware pitch horror story. So this is a slightly modified segment. I usually do hardware horror stories, which you can also tell me hardware horror stories if you want to. I'm sure you have a bunch I've got some, yeah. But yeah, if there's a, any like pitch horror stories where someone , came with the worst pitch ever, or, and then you you saw it completely turn around or it just ends bad. It has, it could have a bad ending too, but I'm just curious. I think the best turnaround I ever had was somebody who came to me like super, super, super smart guy. Engineer at heart, he was building something in the AI space. Very, very advanced ai, even for the current kind of version of ai AI to do with essentially making new products happen. Mm-hmm. And his problem was he had like three different Three different business models, three different ways you could make money. He had four different target audiences. Like, oh, this could work for this. It could also work for that. Could work for, this could work. Imagine. So I'm, I'm gonna have to change this story cuz I'm in a pretty strict NDA with this guy. But imagine he had invention invented a diesel engine, right? And he was like, I'm gonna build diesel engines for trucks and tractors and boats and whatever. It's like, dude, just start like choose one and start there. That was essentially where we ended up. Mm-hmm. And it was really hard because I was like in a friend, I really, really want you to be successful, but you are a pre-revenue company right now and nobody is going to let you fully build out three different business models. You have to have one. And we had a, like a really long conversation about that and I sensed that he was pretty angry with me. Cause clearly he spent a lot of time like building out all these business models. I was like, look, you can do whatever you want, but as an exercise. Pick the one that you think has the highest chance of success in the market , he got grumpy because he'd done all this work. Right. And I imagine. I can totally see how this happened too. He read a business book or he, he did something like that and he goes, oh, I could do licensing, I could do direct sales, I could do B2B sales. I could do, he had all these ideas for how to turn this company to into making money. I was like, look, every single one of these is a completely valid business model and you can't do all of them. Pick one. And I said, look, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make you, but as an exercise, pick the one that you think would work best and map that one out. Where do your customers come from? What's your customer acquisition channel? What does your funnel look like? And he did. And in the next session he came back and he said, can I, can I just pitch? I was like, okay, you don't wanna talk? No, I just wanna pitch. Okay. Great pitch. So he went through his pitch and he picked one, he picked actually a, a business model that surprised me. Hmm. And afterwards I was like, okay, why did you pick this one? He's like, well, the market is really saturated for the other ones. This one, I think it's actually a blue ocean strategy. Nobody does licensing in this space. This is not really a thing, but I think I was like, okay, so why do you think you can? It's like, well, my best friend used to be head of licensing at this company. I went to talk to him and he was like, actually, that's a great idea and can I come work for you? I was like, oh. So suddenly your entire company changed because you picked a business model that you thought would be interesting, and now suddenly your co-founder or your very senior salesperson is like the moat because they are the one who knows everything about how to do licensing in this space. So he was like, you've now built this company around essentially a new staff member did. You didn't even know you could hire or had You thought about the business model that made the most sense for his company, and now suddenly you've shifted the entire business. Well, you, you see where this story is going. He, he took this to market and and the inventors the investors went completely gaga. And the most important reason was that he could focus on what he loves doing, which is r and d. He was just doing research. It was just building the product. He, he never had to do the actual building, the actual, like he doesn't have to build 10,000 of something. You can leave that to the people who are like very experienced process engineers in this case. And he's like, well, I'm good at that, but I don't love doing that. I love building the, the AI part of it. It's like, great. And so he basically managed to build his company around his strength and his strength of his new co-founder, and he went out to raise 15 million and ended up raising 20. Because the investors got into a bidding war. They were all super excited about this. He'd proven out what he could do, an incredible, like, outsized amount of impact on the market that could, could be had. And the last I heard from him, he's fireman cylinders and doing great. That's amazing. Wow. That's, that's an excellent it's, it starts, it's off as like a potential horror story, but like, great pivot. Again, this is the interesting thing. I didn't know that about the market. I would've actually, if I were to push him, I would've pushed him in a different direction. Ah, But because he knew the mark, so this is where the difference is between coaching and advising. I'm not advising, I'm just like, Hey, trying to ask the questions. Trying to get people to do little exercises that helped him get to the, to the right place. And if it'd been up to me, we would've never done that and the company wouldn't have been that successful. So I'm always like a little humbled by, wait a minute, I'm working with these really smart founders. I need to just let them be smart Mm-hmm. and let me be the person who asks the annoying questions, because that's what I do. Gotcha. Interesting. the underlying piece is like the, the the conversation you and I had about the common hardware pitfalls, right? It, like, all, all goes down to that. And the first thing I said to you was that people tried to do too much too early which is super interesting everything ties back to the fundamental strategy that you're taking with your tech. And that's the underbelly of what a technical pitch is all about. It should be if you're honest. And so I, these are potentially very boring questions for you, but I just out of curiosity, like I, I kinda wanna almost do like a lightning round to pick your brain on it in a pitch. The one thing that I feel like people struggle with the most that from the pitches I've seen is that they don't know the ratio between text and like visuals. From your perspective, what, like what do you think about that? So there's two answers to that question, annoyingly. If this is a deck that is a talk over deck, i e it's, it's, you are giving a voiceover over the top of the, this deck, then put as little, little on there as you can possibly get away. With. Most of the time it's you and the investor having a connection. And actually for, for most like pitch meetings, I usually advise to just not use a deck at all. Unless, and this is of course why everybody ends up using a deck, unless you can add to the story with pictures, graphs, visuals that like, would take too many words to share. So if you have traction that goes up into the right, that's a graph, show that as a graph on your thing. But the, the slide has to say nothing else, right? It could just say traction and then a graph, and then put the axes on the graph. And like, is this revenue? Is this a r r? Like, what are you doing here? Mm-hmm. That. That goes up on screen. You go, oh, actually, so what we've done here is, and you can talk people through what this graph is, similarly like pictures of your product, like show a picture of the prototype show where it's now show renders like. Yes, you should probably, if it's small enough, you can hold in your hand. You should definitely hold one in your hand and point and show it off so they can see it's a real thing. But a lot of people are building, I don't know, if you're building a steam locomotive, you're not gonna be able to hold that up in front of a camera. Plus photography is really powerful. Being able to use like, what is it called in CAD when you slice something like Oh, as a section view. Yeah, like section views and stuff like that. If you really want to get nerdy, you can't really show that in real life. It's really hard. So if you have real innovations that somehow unlock what you're building on, show that off visually. But I think generally, if you can get away with like, I think one of the coaching clients I was most proud of, I was like, I, I gave him a little exercise too. We had like 23 slides and they're all jam-packed with words. I was like, you can have five, five words per slide. He goes, what? But he went away and did it, and it turned into a really, really good story. Now, I, a lot of investors want you to send them the deck ahead of time or after a meeting they're like, Hey, Yeah we call it the send a head deck very creative language in pitch coaching. And the other one is called the leave behind deck. Guess what that one is for? Anyway, so this is, this is like after the pitch, you, you talk to one partner and they go, actually, could you send me the deck so I can share it with the partnership? Well, if you send a deck that only has five words and a graph on it, They can probably get it from context, but that's where I say, well, actually you can use a little bit more language, a little bit more words. And if you use figures, you could, on the, on the presentation deck, you wouldn't put references, cuz who cares? Nobody's gonna look up the references in the middle of the presentation. But for the send home deck, or for the take for the, for the leave, leave behind deck, having like a little numeric and a little link to where, what the source is, that kinda stuff. It's just courtesy because honestly Decent investors are going to fact check whatever you put in front of you anyway, so make it easy for them, right? You make may as well make it easy. Instead of having 20 Google searches, maybe they find a different source that says something slightly different and plans a doubt, not worth it. Yeah. And I think in, in terms of adding words or having a lot of text at, at some point, that's also almost a liability of its own. Because if you have I don't know, a triggering words have meaning, and like some, sometimes it could trigger someone to go down a path that you really don't, and miscommunications could happen. So every word you add to a deck, It should really go through a lot of filters because you wanna make sure that it doesn't tell the wrong story. Because people have their own prejudice, they have their own backgrounds, they have one word could mean something to someone, and a completely opposite thing to another. So every word is A is a P like little token of liability. Yeah, totally. Well, I had I had a company that was doing something in this space of e-commerce returns. Hmm. But of course in VC returns is a very specific technical term. It is return on investment and the way they had worded the slides, I was reading this with my VC hat and I was like, Hey, I understand what you're doing here. And a lot of what you read here, immediately when somebody sees it, they will think the different return. And we need to think about what language can we use here. So I understand that this is your space. You're trying to explain your space, but understand the reader, understand the audience. They will think of returns and see something different. And it was really fascinating to see how that how that played out and how we did language. The other thing to keep in mind is like people, like, it doesn't matter how smart you are, people cannot listen and read at the same time. Like, try it. Listen to this podcast and read text. You will not follow the podcast. Or you will follow the podcast and your texts don't make sense. And so if you take a slide, you whack it up on the screen, it has 40 words on it, or a hundred words on it. What immediately happens is people start reading and they're not listening to you. But what ha, where are you saying the most important things about a slide was immediately when it comes up. So you're basically shooting yourself in a foot and setting yourself up for failure by asking somebody to do the opposite of what you want them to do. That is very, very silly. Don't do that. I That's so true. I mean, it's just also understanding human constraints is important when you're pitching. And then one last question because I'm super curious to get your thoughts on this, is what is your thought on product roadmap? That's a big one that people keep asking for. Beyond like operational plans, there's also like the product roadmap. What is this gonna be and like what is your path to that? Do you feel like it's a very important slide or do people get it wrong? People get it wrong all the time. Mm-hmm. I think it's tricky, right? As somebody who's done a little bit of hardware product development, I know that product development cycle includes learning, which changes the product development cycle. And so especially if you're very early in a new product and you say, Hey, , over the next 18 months, these are the things we're gonna do. And three months in, you learn about a constraint you weren't aware of, or the battery tech you were gonna use is no longer available. You have to change the battery, which changes like all the knock on effects of, of everything. Yeah. And so I think it depends a little bit on the audience. If you're pitching to somebody who understands how hardware development works, you can say, Hey, I wouldn't get super granular. I would be like comically low resolution and say, Hey, this is what we're doing. This is the plan, this is the plan. And put a massive asterisk on it and say, Hey, this is still hardware development. Right? We may learn something that could make things go faster, question mark. And then everybody in a room laughs. Cause everybody knows nothing ever goes faster. And you say, well, it could also go fantastically slower. Or we could discover that our, our initial way of building this doesn't work. Like I had a really interesting chat with the chaps who work at fellow, they make these coffee, coffee machines and. Pour over machines and all this kind of stuff, and they were talking about a new grinder that they were trying to design, and they used the IKEA expression. The first thing we designed is the price tag kind of thing, right as they were designed to a strict $200 price tag. Mm-hmm. But they're making an espresso grinder, which very needs very high torque. And they were trying to use a worm gear to, to drive this thing, but they also tried to save money so they couldn't use metal. So they're trying to build a plastic worm gear that needed to be high torque. I can see your eyes raise if you're on a podcast. You can't see this, but Sarah's definitely going. Um, Anyway, they, their engineers were absolutely certain that they could do this. They spent a full year in product development and what they discovered was like, look, our brand value is that we want our products to be around for a long time, and this thing will not survive three years. So, they were like, they went and bought a whole bunch of different coffee grinders and many of them had. Chosen the same approaches they had, and their conclusion was like, oh, they just don't care about the customers. If it lasts for a year, that's how long the warranty is. Great. And if you have to throw it away after that, who cares? And they're like, that's against our core value. And so they ended up having to redesign the entire gear box to be a more conventional gear box where you don't get the friction of a worm gear. And I, it just reminded me of like, Hey, even these people who've been in business for 10 years building coffee equipment, Can somehow, sometimes end up really far down the wrong road because, but then what they told me is like, Hey, this, this machine at the price point is the best coffee grinder out there. It's $200 and we've sold 10 million worth of them in the first three months. Right. And I'm like, aha. Now imagine the alternative universe where they launched this a year earlier with the wrong gearbox, and now suddenly they have 10 million worth of product out to the market that's going to ruin their brand reputation, and they're just gonna get tons of returns. Or people just throw them away, right? Yes. And so they made a really important choice, and again, to your. The question was, do you do a product roadmap? Sometimes you get a year delay in your product roadmap cuz you're walking down the wrong path. And if you, if you stay true to the original product vision of it being like viable to use for three years or more, well sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board. So, long story short, I think showing your product vision. Is important, but a specific roadmap or specific delivery dates can be really risky. A lot of investors see a pitch deck as a prospectus, right? That is not what it is. A pitch deck is a vision a. Prospectus is a very specific thing that is a like, Hey, if you give us, and that usually happens at later rounds, like series D or whatever, I'm gonna raise a hundred million dollars and with that a hundred million dollars, we do these exact things in We know. liberty things. Right? Like it's de-risked to a huge degree. It's de-risk And your unknown unknowns are less. right? And the thing is, there's a lot of unsophisticated investors out there, Yeah. and. Okay. That is, that is a universal truth. But there's a more specific truth, which is there's a lot of sophisticated investors who know a lot about SaaS, who know nothing about hardware, but who are maybe going, oh, I, I should expand. I should invest in a hardware company. Right? And then suddenly, like, you can't do a software update on a worm gear. Right. And I think there's a, there's an important. I think, actually this is the overarching thing for every piece I've said. It's like know your audience. Mm-hmm. Like if you know you're talking to a very experienced hardware investor, you're going to have a very different conversation than if you're talking to a very experienced investor that hasn't done a lot of hardware or a very unsophisticated angel investor. Or if you go to your dad and say, Hey dad, I'm building a new company. Can you lend me 15 K Or Can you give me 15 K, invest 15 k. And go, sure. And the reason they invest isn't for any other reason that they think, sure, I wanna help my kid out, kind of thing. Right. Maybe I'm just telling my story here rather than any universal story. sounds oddly specific, Very, very specific. Yes. But no, my, my parents, whenever I was out raising money, they'd put like a small angel check-in into every company and they lost their money every time because, and I'm like, look, you have to, and I was like, look, if you're just trying to help me out, I, I don't like, I just wanna offer it as an investment opportunity kind of Yeah. No, totally. but yeah, I think know your audience because each. Type of investor. Each segment of investor will have a different need. And I think that's, I mean, that is true for your customers, right? You have to understand, your customers really deeply understand, okay, what does the customer need? How does this product work for them? Is the price point, right? Who actually pay for this? Who's the decision maker? All those things you have to think about in the sales process. You'll also have to think about in the sales process for VC and the, and the crucial thing is you have to understand how VC works. I rattled through that earlier, but go back to that because. Yeah. Your audience is your vc, and they need to be able to see a clear path towards a potential liquidation event. Yeah, definitely. And then to this has been so wonderful and I think it, it re we really went through almost like the full stack of what it takes to get to a successful pitch where it's like a lot of meta thinking around what your product is and where you're at. And then also just like validation of self, validation of product, validation, of strategy and then, Going into the room, understanding your audience, understanding what liability you're taking when storytelling and just to tie it all together. Do you have any just general advice that you'd wanna give the listeners who are either on hardware entrepreneurs or someone with a great idea that just wants to build something and make something? If you just want to build. Something and make something, just build something and make something. I mean, it's, it's flippant, but I think not everything has to be a company or a side hustle. Like build, go build fun stuff, talk to friends, talk to people, talk to other entrepreneurs. I think I think I've seen a lot of really sad stories where people have a cool idea and they spend the next 10 years of their life trying to turn it into a product. And I'm like, if you just wanna build something cool, build something cool. If you wanna run a business, run a business. Those, those are two very different things in my mind. And thinking about that as a, like, know in Silicon Valley people. Talk a lot of crap about MBAs and about people who understand business because what do they know? Well, it turns out there are some business fundamentals. You do need to get right and talk to someone. Talk to an accountant, talk to a business mentor, talk to somebody who's had an mba. Talk to somebody who's been in operations at a bigger company than yours, and see if it sticks. And if they have really serious red flags about what you're building, listen to them. Because I. I know one thing about startups and that is they're not fun, so don't do them cuz you think it's gonna be fun. yeah. And also make sure that you you pick the right people to listen to, right? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Definitely. Oh, well, thank you so much, Haje. This was so incredibly wonderful and I think that a lot of people will have a lot of thinking that they would need to do after listening to this episode and really the, the due diligence that you do for yourself and your story. So thank you so much. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for having me. Hello, if you've made it this far, or you just scrolled on because you are in a rush welcome to the T LDL segment, which is our too long. Didn't listen. It's intended to summarize and extract the key takeaways and actionable items that were talked about in the podcast. Episode so that. Whoever is listening can go on and, take some notes and then get on with their day. And hopefully the, , insights here will help you strategize your technical pitching. At least for today's episode, that was the primary focus. I'll directly go into it. Haje you starts with answering the question of why should builders care about their pitch? Shouldn't the technology stand for itself and he gave really great examples of, , he basically said that technology very rarely speaks for itself. If that was the case, beta max would have been beaten by VHS to HD DVD would have beaten Blu-ray there's a lot of technologies out there. That really just haven't made it because they haven't had proper marketing and pitching, that went into it. And so they even though the technologies were great, they just kind of died in the process. , he also goes on to say that first mover advantage is over-exaggerated when. He gives the example of when a Nobel prize is won it comes up that. There are potentially six to seven other researchers that are working on exactly the same thing. First mover advantage is not guarantee anything. And it's really important to have a very robust and high quality hardware product, but also have a really good storyline to tell so that it can see the light of day. Early stage investors. Look for these three things. They look at early founder market fit. Basically answering the question of, are you inherently the right founder and the right person to make this happen? Context is absolutely everything to, where it's like, you could be the right person, but are you in the right context in your life to be able to. Bring this product to market. , he gave the great example of, , say a founder just had a baby and they, and they invented a baby bottle. , and when that baby becomes four to five years old, they lose steam. So making sure that the founder market fit is something that's sustainable and that exists not only in a specific context, but a wider context. The second piece was, , the fact if it's VC returnable, so understanding the market size and, , the potential of. It becoming big because VCs. Whether we like it or not are looking for a return of investment. And usually it's somewhere around the, 10 to 30 to 50 X. rate And then last, lastly, is anybody willing to pay for the solution? So that's kind of traction. These are the main, three pieces that every VC looks at when they're looking into making an investment. And it's important to include it in your pitch storyline so that you are answering those questions before you get. Specifically asked because that's, what's going to be on, on the top of their mind. He goes on to dive a little bit deeper into traction and says the traction is the antidote to everything. If you figure it out traction, that could be the sole focus of your pitch. And because it is the main metric that VCs care about it, doesn't. He goes on to say that it doesn't even matter how you got there. If you have it, if you can sustain it and you've sustained it and you can show it that's, that should be , the highlight of whatever picture writing. And when you're thinking about raising money, it's really important to understand why you're raising money. Because extending runway is not an interesting. Reason for VCs. So having a really, really good explanation of why. , you intend to raise some money and what you intend to do with it. So, what they want to know is if, say you're are you raise 3 million now and over the next X months? You should be able to answer the questions of what milestones are you going to hit? What important things are you going to do? What hires are you going to make? What are the things that you are unlocking? So you can raise the next round of funding. So being able to have a very concise reasoning as to why you are in need of, additional funds and what you intend to unlock with them is incredibly important. For the prototype stage, when you are raising rounds to say that you're going to build five of something, you also have to have , the following you need to have, you need to determine if the quantity. We'll give you enough user feedback and if not, plan to make more and sell or have beta users for. So basically sometimes people say, oh, okay, I'm going to build five prototypes of this. And that's going to be how I learn about my product, but really answering the question of, is that going to be enough? Is that going to give me the right amount of data points so that I can make informed decisions moving forward? And then, , within this kind of prototype stage, when you're raising, it's not just getting the prototype, but also, so we said user data, that's important market research data, bill of materials, cost yield, and test results. These are going to be, outputs and outcomes that VCs would want to see. That you are using their funds for, then we kind of wheeled it back. And then we said, okay, when pitching one of the starting questions should be, what's the problem who's experiencing this and how are they currently paying for it? And how, how are they currently solving it, is really, really important to get to. , and then the next question would be what is the solution and is the solution. Competitive with the existing solution. Having many target markets, will confuse your story, but not just that, it will also cause you to lose focus and jeopardize your learning. HAje talks about how, when he asked these kind of, , fundamental questions to one of his clients, how they had, , three to four different markets that they felt like they would be a really good fit for. And they had completely diluted. , the understanding of their market because they were trying to spread themselves too thin. So making sure that you don't do that and you have a target market to start with, and then you can always expand. I wanted to drill in a little bit more onto, I guess, the nitty gritty details of creating a pitch deck, because this is something that I'm personally also very curious about one of the questions I asked is, okay, so when you're building a deck, what is the actual best ratio of words to images on a slide? This is a very hot topic. And it changes culturally. But I wanted to get his take on it. Specifically with his experience in VC land. So he said if it's a voiceover deck, which means basically the deck is there to act as a force multiplier with like visuals and graphs. To support your claims. But he said, yeah, if, if it's a voiceover deck, try to put as little as little, , slides as possible. You could even not use a deck altogether is what he said. But like, say you're trying to explain traction and you need a graph, like show that up on the screen and pictures of the product. , whether it's a prototype or render, if it's small enough, you should definitely have it in your hand and bring it with you to the pitch. A, exercise to go through that. He mentioned that he went through with a client was say, you have slides that are just jam packed with words. He said, try to reduce it to five words per slide. And he did this with a client and they had a huge success and they were able to put together this pitch that was like very light on words, but the majority of the message was getting through. It's important to have a preread and a leave behind deck and make sure you're linking all necessary portions of either websites or papers. , or things that you're referencing because good investors will fact check you after you've done your pitch. So making sure that it's easy for them to do so we'll just leave a good impression. I was very interested in having, this notion of having less words, because as I thought about it more, I made a point where , I think it's important for people to ponder. I don't know if it's the right point, but that'll be up to you to think through. But in my mind, having more words is a liability because words have meaning. And while some people receive a word in one way, another person could be. Receiving it in a completely different way. And, choosing words carefully is really important. And the more words you choose, the more risk you take. So using as little words as possible to not have it open to interpretation might be a really good move. So. Ponder that and do without what you will. The readers context and background. Uh, regarding language is really important. So he gave the example of, he was working with this e-commerce return. , business the company kept using the word return because that's what they did. That was, , the main business that they were, , working with. And they kept saying return, but. Haje having had a VC background, he just kept hearing like return of investment because that's a very common word to use. So being mindful of what, language and lingo , catch phrases that other people use is important so that you don't get anything mistaken or there isn't this , unconscious bias that comes with a certain words. So being careful with that as important. Also important to note that people can't listen and read at the same time. So don't force them to, you'll be you'll risk. Losing the message. And the process. So making sure that if you are talking to something, you don't have a wall of text behind you, because what people will do is they'll just start reading it. I wrapped up with asking, , product roadmap, because this is a really hot topic, all the accelerators incubators that's one of the biggest workshops that, , people do. So I just really wanted to ask, how important is it? And his answer was really interesting. He was talking about how, , It gets done wrong all the time. And what he, , generally recommends is that, make sure you budget for learning and be honest around things. How things could go slower due to unknown unknowns. , because I mean, even when you're pitching, he even says like, when you're pitching, you say, oh, like, , things can go faster. And if it's a hardware product, everyone just laughs in the room. Because everyone knows it's just going to be slower. , and. You basically said, like, keep it relatively simple high level. But how, but have a clear roadmap of discovery development and launch with a big asterix because it's hardware. So through your product roadmap, showing your product, vision is very important, but a specific roadmap with specific dates is very risky because the chances of you not hitting those states is really high. So that was really interesting to hear because, I feel like, a lot of advice out there is to really lock it down. , but here the advice was to keep it a little bit more higher level, but definitely like hone in on the vision and mission of the product and how you intend to have milestones to get there, but how the dates are relatively flexible due to the nature of hardware. And then finally in line with what we were talking about of just like the reader's context, it's really important to understand what type of investor you're talking to. And cater your pitch and your story. To that, within reason, obviously, but basically asking yourself the question. Is it an angel investor? Is it an experienced hardware investor? Is this person. An experience, software as a service investor, that wants to diversify with hardware. So they don't really, they don't really know the difference and make sure to give them a clear path to a liquidation event, because that's what they're going to care about. So with that. We end our T LDL a lot to ponder a lot to think about and hopefully some really good key takeaways too. 📍 Take with you, as you determine your strategy around technical pitching of your hardware product. Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoyed the episode. The music for this podcast was brought to you by my friend and incredible musician, Joel, Caffey. The opinions and information shared on this podcast are for informational purposes only. We always recommend that you seek professional advice before taking any action related to your business or personal ventures. Thank you for listening, and I hope that you enjoyed the episode