Beyond differentiation, the other thing that keeps us up at night with a new idea is establishing enough runway to fund the building of our solution. For that, we often turn to people with big bags of money. These might be external investors or internal budget gatekeepers at a company.

When we pitch them our idea, we often lead with our solution and tell them how great or unique it's going to be but this often fails. These external stakeholders don't really care about your solution. Actually, they expect it to be great because you are the expert and that's your job. But they are in the business for one reason and one reason alone and that is to make a return on their investment.

There is a simple equation that has to work when they give you a bag of money and you are supposed to return back 10 bags of money at some point in the future. So they judge your product pitch not on the basis of how innovative it is, but rather as its risk profile:

• first, they want to see if there is any evidence that anyone other than yourself, your team, and maybe your mom, cares about your product.
• next, they want to understand the business model economics of how you'll make money, which is the intersection of your cost structure and revenue streams
• they are less concerned about how your customers are, but they do want to know how many people that represents, which they can then use to size the potential market opportunity.
• finally, they want to know your defensibility story because if you are successful copycats will inevitably enter the market. They want to know how you intend on keeping them from taking away that market from you.
• but above all these things, the thing that gets the conversation started with investors is traction. Investors care about traction above anything else. If you can show the beginning of a hockey-stick curve, where the Y axys is users, revenue, or best of all profit, whoever is the investor, he/she will sit you down and try to understand your business.

How do you get traction? Traction is no more than the engagement of your product with your customers. And you don't need a hockey-stick curve to start this conversation. Any traction is better than no traction, and your better served at first not by chasing down investors with big bags of money, but rather chasing down customers with smaller dollar bills.