Tips From an Investor on What Not to Say to Investors

Note: A version of this post appeared in Fortune Magazine

You want to know the best way to tell an investor that they should not, under any circumstances, invest in your startup? Here are the magic words:

“We have no competition.”

There are many ways that sentence can backfire on you:

There are large competitors that you are unaware of
If this happens, shame on you. We see a lot of startups at Dreamit, many of which are tiny and under the radar. So I’m fine if an entrepreneur misses a small startup or two, but when they miss a major competitor, the founder has lost all credibility with me and probably has no business building a startup in this space.

You are defining the space far too narrowly
So you’re the only marketplace for left-handed stirring straws. Who cares? What’s wrong with using a right-handed stirring straw? You have just shown the investor that you don’t understand the customer. After all, when it comes to making a purchase, it’s the customer’s decision that matters, not what you have in mind.

You don’t understand the baseline
This one is more subtle. There are, from time to time, concepts that are revolutionary enough that the startup truly doesn’t have any direct competitors, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t somehow meeting the underlying need. Before Uber came along, people didn’t just sit outside their caves moaning, “Gee, I wish there were some way I could get to the mammoth hunt.” We drove, took taxis or buses, or just plain walked. We found a way.

Whatever unmet need you are addressing, people are somehow dealing with it right now. They might be using telephones, Microsoft Excel, Post-it notes, walking down to the corner store—somehow, life goes on. As an investor, I want to know how they currently cope so I can assess whether your solution is a quantum leap forward or an incremental improvement—and I don’t invest in incremental improvements.

And if you truly have a startup that has no direct competitors, no indirect competitors, and your potential customers do not have workarounds in place, then your startup is likely addressing a problem that is so trivial, no one cares.