Pretty Pitcher
The term “pitch” has a number of meanings, several holding a great deal of weight in American culture: the initiating action of our national sport; the measure of a singer’s tone; a thick, tarry substance using in roofing and paving; or a sudden, uncontrollable, and often tragic plunge over the side of a precipice.
A startup pitch has elements of all of these.
Plus, it’s bloody hard to write one (much less present one). You have this great idea in your head, you’ve thought it over and through in an endless loop for months, you know all the wonderful and subtle and worrisome ins and outs, all the opportunities and risks and challenges it presents. You know exactly how you’re going to exploit and mitigate and attack them (well, more or less), what needs to happen for you to succeed and what to blame if you fail. And you need to take this complex web of thoughts and distill it into an eloquent, engaging, brief package which anticipates all confusions and concerns, isn’t too vague or too technical for any member of an audience, doesn’t make you look like either an out-of-touch visionary or a beancounter without an imagination, and reliably leaves your audience hungry to hear more and desperate to be a part of what you have.
I mean, it doesn’t sound hard, but actually it is, believe me.
Plus, you need two to four versions of this: an elevator pitch (one paragraph, thirty seconds), a full pitch (a dozen slides, twenty minutes; sometimes more), optionally a one-page of prose to get sent and resent (one page never looks intimidating to read), and — if you’re old-school — a business plan (which will never actually be read by anyone outside your company anyway, so you needn’t worry about your audience).
Worse, you probably need multiple sets. Most likely one for potential investors, one for prospective employees, another for partners, and perhaps a last one for customers (depends on your business, of course).
Fortunately, I’m going to describe for you exactly how to do it.
A pitch should include an overview of your business (the problem you’re solving and what you’re providing to solve it), what your market is, how you’re superior to alternatives, how you’ll make yourself known to (and deliver your product to) your customers, how you’ll make money, how you’ll implement your solution (technical and process-wise), what technical challenges and other risks you face, and what your status and plans look like. Mix-n-match depending on format and audience, of course, and add audience-specific things like what kind of investment capital you’re looking for and what you’ll do with it, or how a partnership would benefit both parties, etc.
Well, that’s it, actually. I should revise my statement above to read “I’m going to tell you very vaguely in maddeningly hand-wavy terms how to do it”. If you want more detail, do some research. There are tons of templates and examples out there for each format; read a few, learn from them, and then throw them out and write your own — there’s nothing worse than following somebody else’s template and simply filling in the blanks. Read a book — Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of The Start has a decent overview of pitching, for example. Write, distill, rewrite, repeat. Most of all, keep it brief. Concise. To the point. Don’t repeat yourself. Avoid extraneous words. No repetition, no unnecessary detail. Don’t bore your audience. If you don’t get the joke by now, please re-read the preceding seven sentences a few times. As for me, it’s Wednesday, so I’ve gotta go rewrite my pitches.
By the way — if anyone is particularly interested in Jectiv’s pitch, email me. I’ll consider it.