BLOG: You Are Not Replacing Anything

Hello Everyone!

There is a mistake so common that you can find it in almost every failed pitch deck. It does not announce itself. It sounds logical. It even sounds smart. But it is quietly lethal, and most people who make it never figure out what went wrong.

Here is how it usually goes.

A new business builds something genuinely good. Better performance, lower price, more features. They are not lying. The product really does what they claim. So they go out and pitch it, and they pitch it against the market leader. "Our product does what X does, but costs 60% less and does three things X cannot." They show the comparison chart. They make the case. Their audience nods. Some of them say "wow, that is impressive." And then nothing happens. No one buys.

The founders go back confused. The product was better. The price was right. What failed?

What failed was the assumption behind the comparison.

Let us use a blunt example. Imagine you have built a flying car. Not a gimmick, a genuinely extraordinary machine. It travels at speeds that rival private jets. It is far more fuel-efficient. It costs a fraction of what a jet costs to own and operate. On every axis that matters to a jet owner, your flying car wins.

Now you take this to a general audience. Regular people. You show them the comparison. You explain that your flying car can do everything a private jet does, only better, only cheaper. They agree with every single point you make. The nods are real. The interest is genuine. But they never buy.

Because they never owned a private jet.

Replacing a private jet is not a problem they have. It is not a goal they are trying to reach. Your entire pitch, your entire value proposition, is built around solving something that does not exist in their life. You have convinced them of something true. And that truth is completely irrelevant to them.

This is the mistake. You are comparing your product to something your customer never used, never needed, and never planned to need.

The right move was never the jet comparison. The right move was to sell cheap airline tickets. Maybe you make $20 per ticket. Maybe that sounds embarrassing next to the idea of selling a flying car to billionaires. But you can sell a million tickets. That is $20 million, earned from people who actually need to travel, in amounts they can actually spend, solving a problem they actually have. The comparison to the jet was education. Maybe entertainment. It was never commerce.

Someone once passed on a line to me that has stayed with me since. They said: "One can earn a lot of money in an Excel sheet." It was the distillation of decades of experience, handed down through generations of business. And it is completely true. It is dangerously easy to add a zero to your price, another zero to your customer count, and watch millions appear in a cell. The math is clean. The logic is sound on paper. But when that model meets the market, those zeros tend to quietly disappear, and the balance sheet tells a very different story than the spreadsheet did.

This is exactly what happens when a business prices its product against the wrong benchmark. If your flying car costs $100,000 to manufacture and you price it at $2 million because "it saves 80% compared to a private jet," you have built a beautiful Excel model. The ROI story works. The comparison is flattering. But you have now created a gap so enormous that it will eventually be used against you.

Not immediately. But eventually.

The first few customers come, hard-won after enormous effort. Then others notice. Competitors look at what you have built. They do not need to understand your exact engineering. They do not need your secret formula. They just need to understand what the product is doing from the outside, and then build something that looks similar enough on paper. Their version does not match yours. But it gets close enough that a customer reading a comparison table cannot easily tell the difference. And they price theirs at $500,000. Or $1 million. Still expensive, but a fraction of yours.

Now you are defending a $2 million product against something that performs at 80% of your standard at half the price. That is a fight you will lose, not because your product is worse, but because your pricing was built on a fiction: the fiction that your benchmark was a private jet, when your real competition was always other manufacturers who would eventually look at what you built and try to copy the outcome, even if not the method.

You cannot price based on what you are replacing for the wrong customer. You must price based on what it actually costs to build, what the right customer can actually spend, and what the competitor who enters your market tomorrow will eventually be able to charge.

There is an exception worth mentioning, because it is real. Some companies do build genuine monopolies, and in those cases, premium pricing can hold. When the product is so deeply embedded, so defensible, so far ahead that no competitor can come close enough to matter on paper, the margin can survive. And that premium is often ethical too, because the customer is still getting real ROI even at the higher price. But that position takes years to build and enormous continued investment to protect. It does not happen because of a comparison chart in a pitch deck. It happens because the business earned it through time, depth, and trust that competitors simply cannot replicate quickly.

Most businesses are not there yet. Most businesses are earlier in the journey, where the gap between their Excel model and their bank balance is still uncomfortably wide.

These two mistakes almost always travel together. First: comparing your product to something your target customer never used. Second: pricing based on the value you deliver to a customer you do not actually have. Both feel like rigorous thinking. Both feel like proper market analysis. But both are anchored to a ghost, a customer who does not exist in your actual market, a competitor benchmark that is irrelevant to the person you are actually selling to.

The question is not "how does this compare to what currently exists?" The question is: what does the person in front of me actually need, what have they actually used before, and what are they actually willing to pay?

Start there. The Excel sheet can come after.

Thank you!