Anchoring in Action
After receiving feedback about Streamplate’s pitch, we’ve realised a change in sentence structure has unblocked a lot.
Last week we pitched Streamplate at Fishburners and learnt how unattractive the term “food-ordering” was to some people. They think it’s a crowded market, a space unable to change because of how well capitalised the incumbents are, and effectively a “dead” market.
So when a venture-capitalist (VC) heard the words “food-ordering”, she admitted to “switching off”. Not good for Streamplate.
We spoke a bit more to this VC and she explained there were other vectors about our idea that we should lead with. This was interesting because this wasn’t about changing the idea, just the order we presented the idea in.
This highlighted an unfortunate bias that isn’t recognised enough — the anchoring bias. I first came across the anchoring bias in Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Laurete Daniel Kaheman. A leading example of this is,
For example, the initial price offered for a used car, set either before or at the start of negotiations, sets an arbitrary focal point for all following discussions. Prices discussed in negotiations that are lower than the anchor may seem reasonable, perhaps even cheap to the buyer, even if said prices are still relatively higher than the actual market value of the car.
So consider the following change on our pitch deck now. Last Friday it was:
And with the feedback from Friday night, it’s now this:
Because of how much history there is in the food-ordering space, many people hear “food-ordering” and either project a set of assumptions onto us, or immediately consider a set of questions that are expansive and exact.
For instance, after we pitched we were asked how we were going to onboard venues, why others wouldn’t emulate our process, why venues would choose us over others, what our transaction rate was for venues, how we were going to onboard customers etc.
Follow-up questions aren’t new or unique to any pitch, but I think this touches on a point about how noisey this space is and unfortunately, how much harder it is to present our idea without falling victim to assumptions. This is really important, because Streamplate isn’t looking to be an optimisation to the market of today — we’re creating a new one.
We’re merging health tracking with food ordering in one app. You can learn more here.
