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An early product demo is nerve-wracking enough without the product crashing in front of a top investor. Today's short story comes from the founder of iGoal, a project-management platform built for founders scaling up their first team.
Six months after launching the product's minimum viable version, the founder gave a pitch at a Vancouver Toastmasters club, mainly to sharpen her delivery for future investors and clients. She wasn't looking for funding yet; she didn't think iGoal was ready. Unknown to her, one of the top investors in British Columbia was sitting in the audience. He came up to her afterward, said he was interested, and asked her to call him.
The next day, she got on a call with her pitch deck ready and walked him through a live demo of iGoal.io. Everything was fine until she opened the meeting-management feature: the platform crashed, then loaded someone else's data, then kept throwing errors while the investor watched in silence. She kept talking him through the benefits of features that wouldn't even load.
He told her he'd seen enough to know investing wasn't right at this stage, since the product was too early. But her attitude, and her ability to keep explaining the value even as everything broke, won him over in a different way: he became her first paying customer, buying an annual subscription worth about $300 and signing up 40 of his own team members.
Her lesson from the whole ordeal: keep going, don't panic, and trust your product even when it stops cooperating. There's a free version of iGoal.io, with paid upgrades for more features.
