By Shahe, Director
In September, I had the opportunity to work with over 30 early-stage startups in 1:1 pitch coaching sessions (mostly through the phenomenal New Wave and 10x Accelerator programs at UNSW Founders) and around 100 people in group presentations on pitching. I’ve said before this is my favourite part of what I do and honestly helping people discover their own ‘gift of the gab’ is an honour and a joy.
Founders ranged in age from high school students (Years 8-11) to post-doctoral researchers. Here are some tips that felt equally relevant to share with people at every stage of the entrepreneurial journey. Maybe they will help you too!
1. Don’t save traction for the traction slide
To make a strong impression, infuse every step of your pitch with as much traction as possible. Even the opening story, infused with traction (e.g. product or pre-launch metrics, a real customer or user story, survey or interview findings, etc.), is going to be more compelling than a hypothetical story (e.g. “meet Jane…”), a rhetorical question, or even research from secondary sources (which anyone can do). All options are on the table, just choose the most persuasive thing available to you at the time and upgrade as soon as possible.
If it’s not infused with traction, or not until the traction slide, the implicit message is that nothing commercial has happened yet and you’re presenting an idea-stage pitch full of assumptions and hypotheses, which is fine if that’s the truth! Once you have traction though, be sure to change your approach to the entire pitch. Many don’t and simply continue to go through the motions of pitching… Ideally, gain and keep attention with traction from the beginning and then drive key points home with the traction slide.
This of course doesn’t mean you can’t talk about things that haven’t happened (e.g. your vision). In fact, all your plans and aims will be even more believable with the benefit of this approach.
2. Create a sense of urgency
As much as you infuse the pitch with traction, you can infuse it with pace and urgency. The speed of your execution should be emphasised, as a key indicator of many underlying factors, including: team capability and harmony, effective systems and processes, user and customer demand, etc.
Around the competitive landscape, emphasising recent market entrants and their quick wins can be a counterintuitively effective tactic here (I suggest avoiding the “no one else is doing this” path).
Around your traction and financials, showing rapid growth in metrics and revenue is obviously ideal but not always available. When asking for investment, mentioning already committed funds and notable backers (with permission) can also work well.
3. If your team is strong, bring it out early
If you were previously the head of R&D at the main competitor of your deep tech startup, consider weaving that into your opening somehow. Consider the same if you belong (or belonged) to a tight-knit community generally wary of outsiders e.g. a surgeon selling to surgeons, or teachers selling to teachers. Or if you are personally connected to the problem and started out in business “scratching your own itch”.
As one of the ancient tenets of persuasion, ethos (or the personal credibility of the speaker) is powerful and shouldn’t be left for the team slide typically late in the pitch deck. Most investors talk about “investing in people” so it’s crucial to prioritise this content early and often if your team is your strongest asset.
If you’re personally the secret sauce, I have found this is the more comfortable way to go anyway. If you don’t lead with your own story, you’ll be downplaying your credentials during discussion of the team slide (for the sake of balance) or risk looking wildly arrogant/ungrateful when you focus on yourself at that stage and gloss over the others due to time pressure (in a say 3 or 5-minute pitch).
4. Make it accessible
Regardless of the subject-matter, all topics can be made relatable and clear to laypeople with effort. In my experience, leading experts in science and engineering always seem to possess the ability to put their work in terms I can understand. It’s the responsibility of all innovators to make their subject-matter as accessible to all people for maximum impact and ROI. After all, you want the audience to not just hear you but also pass on your message through their networks! See Point 7 below.
5. Don’t oversimplify – educate
Making it accessible (the point above) is about using smaller, simpler words where possible – not simplifying key concepts or crucial information beyond all recognition and usefulness. If there’s a complex matter to convey, educate the audience with Plain English language, or simply define unavoidable jargon, and try other techniques including analogy to provide a very quick crash course and help the audience appreciate the rest of your pitch on a higher level – that’s a nice feeling to give us!
6. Link key points back to your thesis or principles
After you’ve made a point, at any stage of the pitch, ask yourself “so what?” – explain why it matters to a key principle that your pitch (and business) is built on. For example, any education startup idea probably rests on one or more of these principles: improving the quality of education, improving equity in education, or improving student welfare. At any stage of your EdTech startup pitch, you can explicitly link what you just said back to quality, equity, and/or welfare; in doing so you emphasise both its importance and the coherence of your entire presentation.
Being clearly principled is in itself important in some pitches more than others e.g. education, healthcare, social work, social enterprise, professional services, etc. To continuously link back to your key principles is likely to attract aligned audience members even if they disagree with parts of your practical plan, earning you the next touch point in the journey. They just “really like where you’re coming from…”
Other principles you can link to might be universal across all startups, e.g. how what you just said impacts your profitability, sustainability, and brand equity.
7. Remember the goals of any pitch
There are a few universal aims of any pitch. Here are three of the most important:
- Earning the next touch point
Your pitch doesn’t need to cover everything you know about your business – it should create curiosity. I often find myself suggesting “more breadth, less depth” so that you can engage with a broader cross-section of the audience by touching on subject-matter they all care about and want to help you with. Less depth means those interested people are more likely to offer you the follow up chat or meeting to further explore your thinking on that topic. This is the goal – the next touch point.
Knowing how much depth is enough to be considered credible (and ‘worth helping’) is a delicate balancing act that requires testing and becomes easier with experience.
- Receiving more and different offers of help
The point above assumes that everyone in the audience has something to offer you and might want to help if ‘asked’ (not necessarily explicitly). I suggest approaching every audience that way. Most pitches just don’t make it clear where the myriad opportunities are to help them. I’m not talking about the explicit ‘ask’ here. Try a marketer wanting to help a scientist because they were commercial enough to outline their ‘go-to-market strategy’ but could use some help with the latest best practices. The scientist who only talks about the science is impressive, maybe memorable, but not accessible to the marketer. Oversimplifying here but you get the point. Collaboration fails to take place and we’re all worse off. On the flipside, the overly commercial founder with their slick slides and faultless delivery can alienate people who assume they lack substance with their blanket statements and confident outlook. Experienced and technical people in the audience may think to themselves “steer clear” and again we all lose.
One key aim of any pitch is to produce collaboration, even in areas you didn’t expect to be helped. Presenting a balanced pitch and making it accessible can help with this.
- Giving each audience member something to pass on
Expanding on the point above, if you treat every audience with respect and give each member something to pass on about your business, you can also unlock unexpected touch points and offers to help through their referrals. Everyone in your audience knows someone who can help you in some way. Making parts of your pitch truly “sticky” is a great way of having people talk about you afterwards. Strong traction will also do this for you as they will talk about how well you’re doing.
An example of an idea that “sticks” is from a biomimicry startup called MicroTau that might talk about placing “shark skin on planes” to make them more aerodynamic and less fuel hungry, meaning cost and environmental benefits. Shark skin has adapted over millions of years to cut through the water efficiently and the same microscopic patterns can reduce drag in the skies. The shark skin is synthetic of course! That is an example of an extremely sticky message that I have passed on many times over a long period. It’s also a good example of educating the audience (Point 5) in Plain English language (Point 4) and linking back to key principles (Point 6).
Hope these tips help you with your own startup pitch!
If you run a startup program or portfolio and would like to invest in your startups’ pitching skills, be sure to check out our Communication Skills page. I would love to chat about your needs and ideas – why not book a Zoom call while you’re there? If you write or speak about pitching, let’s collaborate?
Happy pitching!