What to focus on when pitching, product or underlying platform?
lrm242: I've built a platform company in the past, and it's probably one of the harder startup genres to master. One of the problems is its very hard to impress upon your listener how cool your platform really is. Even with fancy demos, we never felt pitching our platform was received as well as it should--the listener simply doesn't appreciate the work that goes into the foundation.Investors will take the time to try to understand if you can get them hooked on the market opportunity. Unfortunately, its typically hard to convince them that your platform, even though its very cool & innovative, can overcome the intrinsic inertia people have in adopting new tools.Personally, I would be focusing on the applications you can build with the platform. That's what we ended up doing at Metreos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metreos). Our pitches contained 10% platform and 90% real world application examples.Every company is different so please take this with the requisite grain of salt. Good luck!