Common failure pattern among struggling founders and job seekers: answering the question directly. Seriously.
Let's use a hypothetical marketplace founder. An investor might ask something like "it seems like you're going to struggle with supply side acquisition, how are you going to deal with that?"
They answer with "today, we've built a community of 200 of the best on the supply side, and we have an email list of the another 800 in all of our key initial markets prepared for our beta launch this year."
Okay, sure, everything starts somewhere -- but that's not the real question at play. There's a question behind the question. And no, it's not a game, get over yourself -- as a founder or a job seeker, you need to be good enough to fundamentally understand that a question can be an invitation to tell a story.
The answer above supposes that the investor cares about the initial go-to-market. But if that was what they cared about, they'd be clear about it. They're asking about an approach, a framework, a theory of the world. They want to understand the problem as well as you do, or at least gain confidence in your understanding of it.
And so an alternative answer would be...
"The biggest challenge with the supply side of the equation is that there just aren't enough of these people in each city to fulfill requests. In the early days, we're already in those communities and have the email lists of existing supply. In the longer term, just like Uber turned anyone with a car into a potential driver, we think anyone [who can do X] can be a supplier on our platform after just a day of training through our app. In other words, we'll increase the existence of supply ourselves -- and help individuals [monetize this skill/thing] for the first time."
So, remember: a question is often an invitation. Caveat that it's sometimes just a question. It's not hard to tell the difference if you just take a beat and think about the context you're in and why that question was asked.
