Flowcharts and other tools
Of the 10 Questions, “Question 06. How will you make money?” is one of the most difficult to pitch well. As with “Question 02. What do you do?“, most people either dive into too much detail or just make some generic claims (“We’ll pursue a social media strategy!”) or post a price list and hope that the audience will accept that as adequate insight into your business model.
I always use a flowchart to represent how value flows in a client’s business model. It’s not a perfect tool, as incorporating different products, market segments, channels, and timeframes into a single flowchart inevitably gets complicated. My advice is to worry less about perfection and more about capturing how you think about building a scalable business.
If flowcharts don’t work for you, then absolutely use a different tool, such as the Business Model Canvas.
Focus on the future
If your company is pre-revenue or in very early stages of revenue, you are likely spending a lot of energy and attention on the process. Unless your first product is a consumer app, chances are, selling is a high-touch process, knocking on doors, babysitting early adopters and otherwise spending time and money to close each sale.
Most of your stakeholders are less concerned with how you are holding body and soul together in the short term than with how your organization will operate when you are generating millions in revenue. For this reason, focus your pitch on the manufacturing, marketing, sales and service operations that you intend to implement as your sales gain momentum.
Capture your plan for scaling, whether you are focusing on expanding geographically (e.g., from local sales, to national, to international), by target channel (e.g., from direct to doctors, then direct to hospitals, then to both those markets via medical device distributors), by product, etc.
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