Show growth

Adrian Sanders, an alum of the startup accelerator program YCombinator, gives some advice on what is important when talking about your startup:

“Do not tell me how your idea is going to work, show me that it is working. That is far more convincing. Every idea out there has been dreamed up (save money on loans! deliver fresh food instantly! monetize journalism!), but very few actually grow. No YC partner (or person alive) is able to predict 100% of the time which ideas are going to be massive. But if you have a graph showing rampant growth of users or revenue, that’s a pretty good indicator that there’s something there. I may think delivering flowers is the lamest idea for a startup ever, but if you’re growing your revenue and sales by 10% every week for 8 weeks, then you could change my mind and pique my interest pretty quickly.

I think one thing that many people with startup ideas aren’t quite aware of is how ideas really are everywhere and there are very very few that are fundamentally new. So pitching an idea is a pretty low bar…it’s real growth of your implementation that makes your effort stand out from the rest.