Why your best investor pitch would flop with customers

“The pitch you give to your investors should be quite different from the pitch you give to your clients.”

Whaaaaat?

I was left a bit jarred when I heard someone say this on a call recently.

After all, aren't you essentially selling yourself to both audiences, convincing them that you're the best in the business? So what’s so different about the pitches? Very many things apparently. 

I sat on this and gave it some thought, and I believe every founder should really think about this when they’re pitching to either of the audiences, and keep certain distinctions in mind.

The essential point here is that you wanna be as broad as possible when talking to investors and as narrow as possible when talking to clients. What this means is that you want your investors’ imagination to run as wild as possible on what you could be - especially at a pre-seed/seed stage, where the possibilities of who you’d be in a year are based on your vision and not on set-in-stone metrics. You don't want to constrict your investors’ imaginations with the 3-4 use cases that you’ve decided on, but rather want them to think big about what your product can potentially be some years down the line. 

So let’s say if you’re building an AI voice agent for customer support, here’s broadly what your pitch to investors should sound like

“We’re changing the way the world looks at customer support and making it AI-native. We start by automating Level 1 calls and then expand into collections, sales, and onboarding. As we start having proprietary access to all the data hidden in these calls, our accuracy compounds, and we can then integrate deeper into predictive analytics and customer profiling, and more.”

Essentially, a high-level view of what you are right now → where you want to be eventually → and what exactly leads you to that eventual goal. You sell the big unlock that will give them their outsized returns, and you clearly explain how and when that will happen.

The customer pitch, however, should look a little different. Something like

“The average wait-time of a customer who calls your helpline is around 7 minutes, with a 30% drop-off rate and a 60% resolution rate. We automate this process - our AI agents answer calls in <5 seconds, and handle almost ~50% of all L1 calls, handing off the rest to your agents with full context and next steps - dropping queues, increase in FCR, and allowing your team to focus on the hard tickets. All with a completely humanised voice and contextual agent.”

The goal here is to give a more zoomed-in picture and a very clear summary of the problem and how you’re the solution. What exactly will the customer get out of your product? Increased call resolution, drop in queues, etc. Think of it this way - your customer cares how this helps them next quarter, but your investors care how this helps them 10 years later.

And this is not to say that you shouldn't talk about the big picture to potential customers or not talk about granular metric-level details to investors. You really must talk about it all, but the key is to identify what your hook will be to each, and that’s where the difference comes in.

If you go very big picture on your potential customers first, they’ll mostly zone out or give you some generic security, integration excuse on why this won’t work for them. Similarly, if you started with granular-level details on how your voice AI agent saves customers’ time and money to investors, they’d feign some excitement about it but eventually zone out again because you didn’t hook them on with the big unlock.

• After your investor pitch, they should debate your potential and pathways to success, with their imaginations running wild about possibilities.

• After your customer pitch, they should immediately evaluate your solution against their current metrics and costs, requiring minimal imagination to see the value.

The key is matching your narrative to what each audience cares about: customers focus on next quarter's improvements, while investors focus on 10-year transformation potential.