In 2009, Kevin O'Connor (former DoubleClick CEO) was fed up. He would try to research the best college for his son, or the best ski resort for a family vacation, but all the information was disorganized, misleading, or sugar-coated by a marketing team. He wanted a place where he could indicate his specific preferences, review the facts, and make a smart, personalized decision. That summer, he and Scott Leonard set out to fix the problem, building out the basic structure for FindTheBest.com, and hiring a small team (including me) to help perform the proper market research.

Imagine being a Redskin and getting your hands on the Dallas Cowboy playbook before the season begins; or being Target and getting the inside scoop on the marketing strategy of Walmart. In this day and age, understanding your competition, and particularly the marketing strategy your competition is pursuing, is far more critical than many companies realize.

You've scraped along as best you can on your own dime, and you’ve done the proper market research to prepare for your pitch. Now it’s time to deliver the presentation. The problem is that angel investors and venture capital firms (VCs) might watch 100 presentations before they pick one company to fund: you've got one shot to really impress them. At FindTheBest, we've received two successful rounds of funding, totaling around $17 million.

In the process, we've been turned down dozens of times as well. Here are five things we've learned about pitching investors, based on market research principles and feedback we've received from VCs.

1. Show you're solving a big problem

Successful product management is the perfect combination of aligning product capabilities with consumer demands.  As a manager, you are under a perpetual pressure cooker.  Skillfully managing each stage of the development lifecycle and avoiding product management mistakes are top priorities.  I reflect on my previous experience as a product manager for a non-profit's social media platform.  Long hours, beta testing, user groups, and stress balls filled my days.  Ultimately, the efforts were successful and the platform is an integral part of association's membership base.

When Steve Blank spoke at FindTheBest last week, he made one thing very clear, “Startups are not smaller versions of big corporations.” Yet, many entrepreneurs still try to shape their ventures to imitate the practices of corporations. To Blank, this methodology was always quite frustrating. From his 21 years of experience with 8 high technology companies, he has learned how to develop successful startups and how to mitigate failure. His involvement in the startup realm has made Steve a thought leader on entrepreneurship.

Fortunately for future entrepreneurs, Steve has retired from building companies to share his startup wisdom with others. He's a professor at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Columbia, where he helps undergraduate and graduate students turn their ideas into feasible ventures. If you are not a student at one of those universities, you can learn from Steve’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. This book explains why startups cannot pretend to be small corporations because they require entirely different strategies for success. This new style of developing a startup is referred to as the Lean Startup method and has three key points.

3 Key Points of the Lean Startup

Small businesses that operate in local markets often shy away from competing online, preferring to focus on the traditional methods of conducting business. In the United States, an astounding 15 million businesses do not have a website, that’s 58% of all US businesses (Weebly, 2013). This may seem counterintuitive considering how much of commerce is carried out online. However, it is actually a testament to how technically behind many of America’s small businesses truly are.

Moreover, Weebly reported that 56% of consumers do not trust a business without a website. Ironically, by sticking to traditional methods of commerce, businesses are actually losing credibility. Small businesses must get online immediately if they want to be able to compete. But simply having a website isn’t enough. Once a small business has a website, they have to make sure it is search engine optimized.

Market research is an essential cog in every corporate strategy.  Knowing everything possible about your climate is the only way to enter the market and stay relevant. Much like baking a cake, a successful business wholly depends on the successful merging of all the ingredients. 

Focus groups and surveys are core pieces of a strategic marketing plan and market research, particularly during the post-market phase of starting your business and taking your product to market.  Managing your product during the post-market phase is just as important as every other step in the process of starting a new business.

In our case study, a proposed launch of a consumer culinary device called the Dynamic Ingredients Dispenser (DID), we discussed the benefits of drawing upon Market Research reports and methods to help with taking a product to market.

Social media is creating better opportunities to engage and share expertise, family photos, and self-aggrandizing quotes (ok, maybe I'm just talking about myself, but you get the point.)  Specifically, Twitter has empowered us to drop pint size knowledge in under 140 characters.  Its popularity is increasing with each tweet.  According to eBiz, Twitter is the 9th most visited website on the Internet. From teenagers to corporations, Twitters' penetration makes it an attractive option to conduct market research.