Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 65Turn the Knife after You Stick It In

David Cohen

David is the cofounder and Managing Partner of Techstars.

At Techstars, we’ve worked hard to teach entrepreneurs how to “turn the knife.” Whether you’re presenting your company to investors, partners, or customers, you should focus on the pain you address before you discuss the tremendous solution you’re bringing to the market.

Describing the pain is usually quite natural, but many people forget to finish the job. Think of describing the pain as sticking the knife in. Your job is not done. You have to really make me feel it. You do this by twisting the knife slowly, deliberately, and repeatedly.

SendGrid, one of the Techstars Boulder 2009 companies, did an excellent job of turning the knife. Their product improved the deliverability, scalability, accountability, and reliability of software-generated email. Sounds like a real problem, right? The following is how they turned the knife.

“Twenty percent of legitimate emails sent by software companies to their customers will end up in spam folders.”

Ouch.

“A large e-commerce company determined that if just 1% of their annual email notifications aren’t delivered, it costs them 14 million dollars in lost sales.”

Stop it!

“This same company figured out that at least 7% of their email is ending up being marked as spam. This problem is literally costing them a hundred million dollars a year.”

I’m begging you—show mercy!

“This is an epidemic with a staggering financial cost. There ...