Entrepeneurs partner with new product design engineers like E3K to craft high quality prototypes for use in investor presentations. When approaching potential investors, getting this presentation right is key. You must show a clear plan for the product, its functionality and its place in the market. With a well made prototype to show investors, this all becomes more clear. In this blog, we’ll go over tips for getting this presentation and your prototype ready to impress investors.
Is My Product Design Investor Presentation Ready?
Starting Your Evaluation
1. Evaluate the product
- Problem and solution: Does the design clearly illustrate the problem and how the product is a unique, effective solution?
- Value proposition: Is it evident how the design adds value for the customer? Focus on user experience, benefits, and differentiation.
- Functionality and aesthetics: Does the product have a strong design? It should be both functional and aesthetically pleasing, and easy to use.
- User experience: Show how the product fits into the daily lives of customers and how they might interact with it.
- Viability: Does the design demonstrate that the product is viable, competitive, and ready to solve the problem for the end-user?
2. Evaluate the presentation
- Tell a story: The presentation should tell a compelling story about the problem, your solution, and the market opportunity.
- Emphasise key points: Use visual hierarchy (e.g., bold text, icons) to guide the audience’s focus to the most important information.
- Show, don’t just tell: Visually demonstrate how the product works to help investors understand its potential impact and functionality.
- Focus on the positive: If showing graphs, present a positive story. Avoid showing declining graphs.
- Practice: Rehearse your delivery to ensure a smooth and professional presentation that engages the audience.
- Avoid technical jargon: Do not overwhelm investors with excessive technical details. Keep the focus on user benefits.
Assessing the Prototype
For functionality, set clear performance standards as benchmarks before you start testing. Next, choose a diverse group of beta users to use the prototype and assess its usability. Once you’ve collected this data, document and analyse the results. What did you expect, and what were the results? What can you tweak to get the product more ready for presenting? What might investors like to know about the data you collected?
While collecting this data, you should also conduct market research. Use your prototype to test and understand demand in the market versus what similar products already exist. Would the beta users actually use your product in real life, or do solutions to the problem it solves already exist? What’s your competitive edge? Make sure this final vision of the product in the market is clear to investors.
Tips for preparing investor-ready models
- Create a works-like and looks-like prototype: For a physical product, you will need both a functional (works-like) model and an aesthetically refined one (looks-like) to show investors. This helps them see how and where the product will sit in the market.
- Build to impress: Focus on creating a prototype that builds confidence and shows investors you have a viable product. This is even more important than perfecting the user experience at this stage. High quality 3D printing is a great way to do this.
- Protect your intellectual property (IP): Before sharing, consider filing for a patent for novel functions or a design patent for aesthetics. Use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with anyone who sees the prototype.
- Tell a clear story: Use the prototype as a tool to tell the story of your product, its benefits, and its market opportunity, rather than just as a technical demonstration. You might use data collected from beta testing here.
- Show progress and iteration: Present the prototype alongside data from user testing and iterations to demonstrate that you have a clear development roadmap and have already solved potential problems. By using a service like 3D printing, you can show this evolution very clearly.
Why E3K?
Mechanical design firms like E3K are the perfect partner for product design iteration. We have extensive experience, advanced simulation capabilities, and integrated development process. We offer a blend of mechanical engineering expertise, 3D printing for rapid prototyping, and powerful Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to test and refine designs before costly production.
Our award-winning track record and comprehensive services from initial concept to physical testing provide a strong foundation for bringing a new product to market successfully and cost-effectively.
We want to help you iterate designs from concept to presentation-ready prototypes. Contact us today.