The investor deck says the category is being rebuilt and the market is measured in billions. The home page says the product saves an operations lead four hours a week. Both were written by the same two people, a few weeks apart, and neither was written with the other one open. That gap is a positioning problem, and it usually surfaces at the worst time, on a diligence call.
An investor and a customer are buying different things.
An investor is buying the size of the thing this becomes and the reason you are the team that gets there. Underneath every slide is one question: can this be very large, and do you have an edge that is hard to copy.
A customer is buying relief from something annoying them this quarter. They do not care what the company becomes. They care what happens on Tuesday, whether it fits the systems they already run, and what it costs them to switch.
The two versions point at different horizons on purpose. The mistake is not that they differ. The mistake is writing one and reusing it in the other room.
Both versions come from one spine.
Underneath them there is a single observation about the world that makes each true. Something has changed, and the way people currently solve this problem is a worse fit than it used to be.
The investor version extends that forward: if this is true, here is how many companies eventually have this problem and what solving it is worth. The customer version narrows it to now: if this is true for you, here is what you stop doing next week.
If you cannot write the sentence both versions come from, you do not have two audiences. You have two unrelated pitches, and the distance between them will show.
Horizon, scope and proof are where they may differ.
Horizon is the obvious one. The deck may describe three years out. The home page may not, because a stranger reading it is deciding about this month.
Scope is the second. The deck names the eventual market. The site names the wedge, and a narrow wedge reads as strength to a customer even where it looks small in a deck.
Proof is the third, and it is the one founders get wrong. Investors will take evidence about the team, the pace and the early signal. Customers want evidence about the product working for somebody like them. A claim you cannot support in a customer's own words does not belong on the site at all, whatever the deck says.
Three contradictions are worth checking before you raise.
The first is a market claim customers would not recognise. If the deck says the market is everyone with a browser, and every good account you have is a logistics company with under fifty people, an investor who calls two of your customers hears a different company than the one in the room.
The second is a category the site does not support. Naming a new category makes a round easier to explain, and founders sometimes do it in the deck while the home page still describes a cheaper version of the incumbent. Pick one. A category claim is worth making only if you will pay for it in customer education.
The third is a wedge that disappears between the two. The deck names who this is for; the site quietly widens until it is for everyone. You have then told your investors something your own front page contradicts.
Assume an investor reads the site before the meeting, and that a diligence call gets compared against it.
Write the customer version first.
The customer version is the one that can be proved wrong this month, which is why it is worth writing first. Get it right, listen to what people say back, and the investor version becomes an extension of something you know rather than a projection built on a Sunday.
The four decisions that make up the customer version are in the sentence your startup must earn. Do those, then write the deck from them.
Making both versions come from one spine is what Positioning is.
Tell us what you're building.