Earlier this year, my company advanced to the final stages of two prestigious start-up competitions. Both times, I got up on stage and belted out my prezo in C Major (our product is LaDiDa, an iPhone app that helps bad singers make music), and then backed up the singing with solid growth metrics on our business. The audience loved it, and LaDiDa was a crowd favorite to win in both contests. But when it came time for the judges? feedback, I was frustrated to hear a familiar refrain: ?Your demo is great, really cool app,? they said, ?but we can?t give you this award because your product doesn?t solve any obvious pain point.? Most investors will tell you to never walk into a meeting without a good answer to ?what?s the problem you?re trying to solve??. Dave McClure?s famous Startup Viagra: How to Pitch a VC deck puts this question right up front, at slide #2. Focus on pain, say the experts. Your product must be a painkiller. While there is obvious wisdom to this rule, there is also a flaw in using this rubric exclusively. Consider, for example, that the most addictive technologies we?ve seen in the past few years would have never passed this test before millions of people were already using them (that?s perhaps why so many VCs missed the boat on Twitter). Editor's note: Guest author Prerna Gupta is the CEO of Khush, which develops the music-creation iPhone app LaDiDa that has been downloaded 270,000 times.
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