Brief Summary
This video provides a comprehensive guide on how to pitch your company to investors, particularly when you are pre-product market fit. The speaker emphasizes the importance of being concise and easy to understand, focusing on key elements like what your company does, your team, traction, unique insights, market size, and your ask. The video also highlights common mistakes founders make during their pitches and offers practical advice on how to avoid them.
- Be concise and easy to understand.
- Focus on key elements like what your company does, your team, traction, unique insights, market size, and your ask.
- Avoid common mistakes like using jargon, being vague, and not asking for money.
What Do You Do?
This chapter focuses on the importance of being able to clearly and concisely explain what your company does in two sentences. The speaker emphasizes the need for a specific example to illustrate your company's value proposition. He uses Airbnb as an example, explaining how it allows homeowners to rent out their apartments online and collect payments through the platform. The speaker also highlights common mistakes founders make, such as using jargon that investors may not understand and providing vague examples.
Your Team
This chapter focuses on the team slide and its purpose, which is to showcase the individuals on your team, their roles, accomplishments, and credentials. The speaker emphasizes the importance of highlighting how team members have personally experienced the problem your company solves. He uses Airbnb as an example, suggesting that the founders could talk about their own struggles as starving startup founders who couldn't afford rent and how Airbnb helped them solve that problem. The speaker also warns against common mistakes, such as not including titles, focusing on coding skills, and telling long stories instead of highlighting specific accomplishments.
Traction
This chapter focuses on the traction slide and how to effectively communicate your company's progress. The speaker emphasizes that traction can be achieved even before launching your product and that a graph is not always necessary. The key is to clearly explain what you have accomplished since starting your company and why it is impressive. The speaker also warns against common mistakes, such as including fake work or irrelevant data, and emphasizes that a bad traction slide is worse than having no traction slide at all.
Unique Insights
This chapter focuses on the importance of highlighting unique insights about your problem, customer, or potential solution. The speaker emphasizes that these insights should be non-obvious and backed by data. He uses Airbnb as an example, explaining how the platform's unique value proposition lies in its ability to process payments in a low-trust environment, which facilitates the marketplace. The speaker also warns against common mistakes, such as presenting insights that are not truly unique and failing to provide specific examples.
Market Size
This chapter focuses on the market size slide and how to effectively communicate the potential of your market. The speaker emphasizes that the way you calculate the market size is more important than the actual number. He suggests providing a bottoms-up calculation that shows how many users you can reach, how much you can charge them, and why. The speaker also warns against common mistakes, such as quoting generic market reports and failing to show the math behind your calculations.
The Ask
This chapter focuses on the importance of asking for money during your pitch. The speaker emphasizes that many founders fail to do so, resulting in missed opportunities. He explains that investors often have a subconscious desire to say yes if they are put on the spot, and that asking for money can tap into this desire. The speaker also warns against common mistakes, such as not providing social proof, focusing on hiring plans instead of revenue milestones, and failing to clearly state your goals for the investment.
Overall Pitch Structure
This chapter focuses on the overall structure of your pitch and emphasizes the importance of ordering your points from most to least impressive. The speaker suggests starting with what your company does and ending with your ask, with the remaining elements ordered based on their level of impressiveness. He also emphasizes the importance of earning the investor's attention and not leaving the best stuff for the end.
Pitch Delivery
This chapter focuses on the delivery of your pitch and emphasizes that it should not be a one-way presentation. The speaker suggests engaging the investor in conversation and using their interest as an opportunity to delve deeper into specific topics. He also emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the investor's body language and using simple, visually boring slides to avoid distractions.
