10 Sentences You Should NOT Include in Your Pitch to Audience in the Middle East

by | Oct 8, 2014

Every investor has seen a pitch that has made them wince. When pitching, it pays to plan to think big and plan to scale, but also to have a sense of how to go about that realistically. The biggest mistake most young entrepreneurs make is underestimating the difficulty of the market in the Middle East and North Africa. Here are versions of some of our favorite approaches, some exaggerated, some not:

  1. “We will capture 100% of the market; everyone will want to use our product.” (or any percentage over 10%).
  3. “We don’t need a marketing strategy, we’ll gain 1 million users in a year just via word of mouth.”
  5. “We plan to be making $10 million in revenue by our third year, worst case scenario; it’s in the spreadsheet.”
  6. “Monetizing is easy. Even though our portal is targeting a small market, we don’t need sales, we’ll just use online advertising.”
  7. “We’re like AirBnb but more social, with a FourSquare component, focused on restaurants in Dubai.”
  8. “We don’t really have any competitors; no one’s ever thought of this before.”
  9. “The model is already proven in the U.S., so we’ll just do exactly what they’re doing, but in the Middle East.”
  10. “We are not focused on revenue. Instagram never made revenue, but it sold for a billion dollars.”
  11. “We’re building the Pinterest of the Middle East; Pinterest will have to acquire us to enter the market.”
  12. “We don’t have a product, but it’s a great idea. We can launch and succeed in two months if we get investment.”

 

Source: http://www.wamda.com/2012/12/10-sentences-you-should-not-include-in-your-pitch-to-investors-in-the-middle-east