Pitching your startup soon…? Here’s the feedback I kept repeating

I love getting the opportunity to work with startups on their pitches. It’s probably because my first startup gig was being the deck monkey, building slides for pitches and roadshows. And then with PIE, I had the opportunity to workshop pitches all of the time. So forgive me if it makes me nostalgic.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of sitting in as the guest critic for the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network Angel Oregon Tech virtual pitch practice. A bunch of founders took five minutes to run through their pitches. And after nearly 3 hours of pitch practice, I realized that I had been saying a lot of the same things over and over again.

Which seems like a pretty good reason to write them down.

So here’s what I kept saying. Rambling and all.

1. Hook them before you introduce yourself. This was the big one, and I said some version of it to most of the founders. “Even before you introduce yourself, give people something to lean into to say either, I don’t understand, or that’s shocking, something that engages them emotionally. Make it provocative. Better to lose some people because you’re being too spicy than be bland to everyone.” Your name can wait. And sometimes the hook is already sitting in the deck, just in the wrong place. To one founder, I said, “Your closing is actually stronger than your opening. So you might wanna like flip-flop that.”
2. Stay in the problem space until you move into solution space. “Always stay in the problem space until you introduce the solution. And once you’ve introduced the solution, you can’t go back to the problem because then people are like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re discovering problems as you go along.” So it’s problem and then solution, with no backtracking.
3. Get to the product sooner. This is the flip side of that last one, because you can’t stay in the problem space forever either. “For the first 6 or 7 slides, I was like, what is this solution? What is the product?” If the audience is still trying to figure out what you sell most of the way through the presentation, they’re not listening to you. They’re confused.
4. Feed us the logo candy. It’s “what I always call the logo candy slide.” If you’ve got customers or partners with names people recognize, show them off. “Make the logos way bigger and basically the headline of that slide.” If I can recognize it at a glance instead of having to read it, all the better.
5. Don’t equivocate. “We plan to, or we might, or we’re thinking about…” Nope. “If it comes out of your mouth, you are doing it or you’re not doing it.” So pick one.
6. Your internal names aren’t for the audience. You love your product names. And you should, because you named them. But “The naming of the products may be valuable to you. They’re not valuable to me as an audience member.” The same goes for the fine print on how your products differ from each other. “I realize the product differentiation is important to you and the company. It’s not terribly important to the audience.”
7. And then there is the thing I say every single time I review an early version of a pitch. (So much so that I gave it its own post.) Think books for Amazon. “When Bezos was originally pitching Amazon, he didn’t say we’re going to be the biggest e-commerce company in the world. He was like, we’re going to be the biggest bookstore.” So “Tell enough of a story that it’s big enough to be interesting and not so big that it seems unattainable.” Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start with whatever the “books” are for your current pursuit.
8. Don’t be locked into the slide order. Bring your strengths forward. Because team and traction have a tendency to get buried at the end of the deck. “Anything that strengthens that position should go higher in the deck.”

If you need more on structure, I’ve written up how I think about a stage pitch before. Hook, bulk, reveal, ask. It still mostly holds up.

But the thing I really wanted the group to walk away with was the idea of “thinking about this as a plot device to get you to the next conversation. No one’s going to write you a check based on this pitch. You just want to get them hooked enough that they want to have that next conversation with you.”

Interested in the program these founders are working through…? For more information, visit OEN Angel Oregon Tech.