Investors now look for PMF (product-market fit) and critical evidence for scalability one stage earlier.
“I really enjoyed the pitch by the startup X”, he told me. “The founder seems very credible, with a background in management consulting and strong tech creds. I am going to invest but can you please have a chat with them about the marketing strategy?”
Lack of fluency with data, absence of basic (or better yet, not-so basic) analytics tools (see our newsletter edition on MarTech) and limited understanding of a customer journey to a purchase is a red flag 🚩
One slide with a cliche strategy akin to "We will add more channels to our digital marketing campaigns" or “We need £500k for the roll out of an ATL campaign” definitely warrants further probing.
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