Template and Guide

The Pitch

The ability to pitch is crucial and helps you with many tasks because communication with people is essential. Pitching means a concise, short, and pregnant first serve of an opportunity to create a future together. That is true for investors, customers, great talents you want to hire, or someone you want to approach in the grocery store for a date. The very first serve of your message is the pitch.

In this section, we’ll highlight some key aspects of communication to mind and take example.

The Big Things

The very first question before sketching your pitch is: Who is the target audience, and what is your intention? Based on these two pillars, the narrative builds up. Make some thoughts about your target persona, their habits, lifestyle, wording, and attitude before drawing the narrative and writing headlines and text.

How To Build Your Pitch

Assuming that you have target audience and your intention on your mind, let’s now try to convert that into a narrative. In this sample, we’ll assume that the target audience is early-stage startup investors, and your intention is to convert them into a follow-up, because they’re so keen on your endeavor to invest.

Understanding your Target Audience

Your target audience hears pitches like yours all day and receives multiple outreaches via LinkedIn and email. They were pitched the next Facebook for Pets yesterday and the next Uber for screws and bolts the day before.

They are not as deep in your thoughts as you are, and you may not get lost in details when talking to them. Use a simple story and a clear message. They hear about your world the very first time and might still have the meeting before on their mind, so you have to hook them to open their mind for your message. Make the most important key fractions easy to digest.

You can anticipate what your target audience expects you to tell: what’s the problem you solve, why you and what’s the approach?

Spinning your Narrative

The narrative is the frame of your pitch and, neurologically, why one’s synapses try to embed your message into their neural network. That’s the hook for why someone draws attention to you. Tell them a unique, simple, and concise story they’ll remember.

Tell people why you are doing this, why you put yourself at risk against all odds. It is crucial to understand.

To build up a story, it’s essential to have a central theme that gets richer iteratively. Things have to make sense to be understood. If you tell why your solution is excellent while your audience doesn’t understand what problem you are solving, you waste time.

Simple and Concise Messages

Tell things simply and concisely. We’re confronted with messages and offers like on a noisy street. Your counterparty has to understand you at that moment to get in touch with you and discuss your idea.

Don’t try to sound sophisticated or intelligent; try to deliver the key message concisely and on point.

Abstract complexity to remain simple and leave out details. It’s not necessary to be 100 % accurate on the pitch, be clear.

What’s important for investors

Pitching to investors requires different communication tools compared to pitching to customers or potential talents. This section will highlight the difference to pitch to investors.

Validation

Venture Capital investors are risk averse. They want to hear what risks on your journey you see, what you did already to validate your assumptions and how you’re going to mitigate the risks ahead.

Differentiation

What do you do differently, and why can’t others quickly build what you have? What takes you apart from your competitors and makes you a unique offer on the market?

Momentum

Investors love to keep a startup’s pace high, which requires already existing momentum. What is the latest and greatest that you have achieved that now leads to an inflection point? Did you get that great engineer and tripled your customer base within a few weeks? Tell them!

Market

At the end of the day, the realistic market size will determine the value of your company. If the entire market you can serve makes 100m EUR, then you’ll be unattractive to most players, because the potential upside doesn’t fit the math of their fund.

Velocity

Building a startup compares to driving a race car while building it. It’s important to implement necessary changes quickly. If you think that the current way a feature is implemented doesn’t fit the customers world or a new team member destroys the culture of the team it’s about making decisions quickly.

Traction

If a problem does exist is one thing. The other is if you sufficiently meet other people’s expectations with your solution is the other. Having traction is indication that your assumptions might be right, and that you can deliver based on those observations.

Sample Deck Outline

  1. Cover Slide
  2. Why
  3. Problem
  4. Solution
  5. Why now
  6. Market
  7. Competition
  8. Business Model
  9. Team
  10. Financials
  11. Vision

Cover Slide

Simple slide showing the logo and some contextual information (date, event, …)

Why - Company Purpose

Explain why you do this, and why someone should listen to your pitch. Start the story – what did you observe, that made you start this venture?

Problem

Tell about the problem you observed.

Why now?

Most great ventures became great because they had the right timing. This could be breakthroughs, seldom events or other reasonable explanations to emphasize why this opportunity is right on spot.

Market

Rather as a hygiene factor, it is important that the market you work with fit with the needed metrics for VCs. Just get that box ticked and move on.

Competition

Position yourself compared to the current market, and take obvious calls for the market because others will most likely anticipate those players. Take this as an opportunity to highlight your differentiation.

How do you make money?

Okay, your market and competition are clear. How do you make money?

Team (Deliver your idea)

The problem, Solution, Market, and Business Model are cleared. Now, emphasize why you will rock the market and back your claims and assumptions with one of the most important assets you, as early-stage startups, have – your team.

Financials

You can’t project revenues accurately, so don’t do it. Instead, focus on the next important inflection point, how you will reach that, and explain how much you need to achieve.

Where are you, what do you need and how far will you get with that.

Vision and Opportunity

Reasonable explanations so far cover mostly the world ahead, now the stage is set to tell about your big ambitions for the long term.