How to Upgrade your Pitch beyond ‘Start with Why’
TLDR:
Upgrade your pitch by converting a linear narrative into an exponential vision by:
- Connect emotionally with the listener by “Start with Why”.
- Tackle the disbeliefs that will naturally form by clearly articulating why “Reality is Slow”
- Become investable of the listener’s time and money by explaining how you can become “Faster than Fast”
Founders lose 90% of their possible champions because of their pitch.
Most pitches explain the end vision clearly, but leave the listener to convince themselves into becoming a believer.
By transforming a linear narrative into an exponential journey for the listener, founders will unlock 10x the virality of their pitch across friends, customers, and investors.
After building a startup for many years and meeting hundreds of founders, I have become fascinated by the “founder pitch”.
Pitches are such a unique expectation in the startup world. There is an irrational acceptance that your entire narrative must be understandable & investable in 10 seconds. I can’t even order fast food in 10 seconds.
Simon Sinek’s famous “Start with Why” speech is a phenomenal explainer of how to connect to a listener. It resolves the first problem of a pitch: that people don’t listen until they know why they should care. Sinek wonderfully cuts into the human psyche by ensuring you pitch the “WHY” before anything else. Because everything after is noise unless “why” is clarified. Think of it as the activation energy to even start caring.
Crudely, most people want to know a few things:
- Why is this problem worth any human’s time? (so that I can bucket how much you value your own time)
- What are you doing without jargon? (so I can bucket your industry/cohort inside my mind)
However, just as you have finished the “why” problem, the listener has already forming conclusions. Remember, everyone nowadays is a super-smart “first-principals” thinker. They will immediately construct a linear narrative in their head and nod along.
This is a dangerous place to stop because the listener is NOT convinced. They will not vouch for you. They will not invest in you. Why? Because there is nothing to believe. It’s all too rational.
The natural response for the listener is to eventually ask themselves the golden questions: “This seems obvious, why does this not already exist? Whats slowing it down? Why can’t you just start selling? Who will stop this?”
These are a great questions, after-all, you are not Elon Musk. Why haven’t all the smart people already resolved this? This disbelief lingers with the listener since the straight-shot linear story is so rational that it’s irrational.
As technologists, we know for a fact that the reality of 2020 and our vision twenty years ago are pretty disparate.
Your job as a founder is to bridge this gap by articulating why “Reality is Slow”.
- What is required to grow this business that doesn’t exist yet? What investments are needed? What product hardships need to be crossed? What non-googleable insights do you have about why progress is slow?
- How long are these barrier, and how well can you articulate them? Why is linear growth not currently achievable?
However the battle of convincing a listener doesn’t end then. After you break their disbelief by explaining why something is not a straight-shot linear story… you have to convince the inner investor in them. An investor is primarily concerned by one key resource: time. Time is whats limited and converting time into MORE money than a bank is the investor’s only job.
This is the convincing blow. You become investable by explaining how you can be “Faster than Fast”.
As a founder, you have to understand your business more than others. You must know techniques that outpace linear growth that are not found on google.
- What are growth vectors and distribution vectors that get us that exponential growth opportunities? Do we know which are “fake” exponentials to target the real ones?
- What are the network effects, the secondary business lines to be created, the sales cycle alignment, the partnerships to be built?
When well described, anyone can see the linear path from now to the future. Thats the sign of a good pitch setup. But your pitch must do more. It must convince them to promote you, vouch for you, and ideally invest in you. As a founder, you must know the deceleration and acceleration vectors for your narrative.
A convincing pitch is one that transforms a linear story that is instantly built by a listener into an exponential vision that breaks past their misconceptions. This skill is not only for talking to investors, but is necessary to explain your story to any lay-person.
