Firstly, often enough, VCs are primarily looking for 'high growth' companies, and they only secondarily look at whether 'tech' is significantly involved - which is to say, it's safer for a general investor to look for viable business investments regardless of what the nature of the investee's competitive advantage is.
Secondly, tech VCs which have a specific mandate to look at technology are not looking at all sorts of technology. To go far left-field on this, for example: businesses which have at their core a practice of industrial engineering and systems engineering may not be considered to derive their competitive advantages from 'technology', as so much of the application of process is to humans and their behaviours in environments outside of software, and outside of software-connected hardware, and outside of software-connected customers.
Personally I work with on technology which primarily affects how human workers interact with each other, and how they interact with hardware and software entities. I am also in no rush to grow my business quickly, as the competitive advantage which I seek is to always focus on developing internal competencies which are pre-trendy on the innovation adoption curve. We would want to exit any area of research which starts to trend.
I am curious about what sort of VCs to approach in the future.
Now in our fifth year of business, I am circling back to spend more time on getting new investors into our very small business. After a bit of ding-dong-chat-chat with folks in another group, I centered myself around (the above) concern.
While I was initially conducting a general question about what sorts of strategies to use when pitching a slow-growth business to new investors... predictably, some folks requested for a templated summary of what the nature of our business is. This is how I replied.
(i) We help [FACILITIES MANAGEMENT BUSINESSES (example: hotel / restaurant / cafe / coworking / coliving / office / gym / laundry / pool / club))]
(ii) that [face a problem] with managing internal staff to execute on [process optimisation, 24-7-365 operations deployment, technical maintenance, industrial design, marketing communications, bookkeeping, regulatory compliance, and brand management; product R&D, retail merchandising ]
(iii) By [sending in our staff to do it, for a fee ]
(iv) Unlike [people who sell advice, or people who pay for advice, whereas neither of these parties prefer to send in the muscle],
(v) [reason why you're better]: it appears that many operations in the market lack the actual acumen to hit all the operational goals that they want to given the resources that they have on hand; we want to provide a white-label solution segmented by (ii) for this the (i) type of business
(vi) As presented by [our continuous operation of one prototype for 4.5 years to-date] (I think this is weak, but it's the main thrust of the argument, so yeah, looking for resources to do more of the same, really)
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