What we learned from The Pitch Bootcamp

(and you can learn too)

The Pitch podcast,a show where start up founders pitch their companies to a panel of investors, is one of the most realistic portrayals of investor/ start up relationships out there. It’s as if they were sitting in Coupa Cafe with a microphone and listening in on the coffee meetings that are impossible not to overhear.

And, as a start up themselves, in search of how to make a business out of a weekly podcast, they’ve been very transparent abut their search for sustainability. In one episode the host, Josh Muccio, pitched his co-host and investor Sheel Mohnot, on a new direction for the podcast: providing pitch training to start ups. I recently went through their 3-day pitch coaching program and here’s what I learned:

It’s a conversation not a presentation

Our first draft of our pitch sounded a lot like a presentation. I outlined everything that is supposed to in a little over 2 minutes. I thought I was doing great. But unless you are on stage at a demo day, you are most likely talking with an investor one-on-one over coffee or Skype. You’re not presenting. You’re just chatting; it’s really hard to pay attention to someone who is doing a TED talk for an audience of one. It’s also weird. Talk to them as if you were catching up your friend on a conversation that they missed the first part of because that’s exactly what you are doing.

Don’t sweat the details

You’ve been working on your company for months or years, and you’ve (hopefully) accomplished a lot. Investors don’t need to hear every little thing you’ve done, or the technical details behind your product. Just give them enough detail so they understand what you are trying to do, and they will ask follow up questions. This isn’t a technical due diligence meeting, it’s a first date. Too many details will muddle the message and make a second meeting much less likely. And yes, we did this wrong too.

Sound Bites matter

Investors don’t make decisions in a vacuum. They are going to talk about your company to their friends, to their partners, and to their other portfolio companies. The easier it is for them to remember what you do, the more likely they are to bring it up to others, and bring it up in a way that accurately reflects what you are doing. It’s a massive game of telephone where your company’s pitch is the message, so make your message clear and easy to repeat.

Are you pitching? Get coached

As a company you should do everything you can to not get filtered out of the investment process. While the Pitch bootcamp isn’t meant to make introductions to investors, it can help you present your best self when you do. It was a great experience for us, and I highly recommend it to anyone else who is planning on meeting with investors in the near future.

Our Pitch

It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better than where we started. Without getting lost in the weeds, it tells the problem we are solving, why it’s a massive opportunity, and why we are the team to do it. Thanks again to Josh, Andrea Barrica, and Sheel for helping us along the way.

Here is the pitch that we landed on by the end of the bootcamp:

With Conversant Labs we are making voice based computing a reality.

Siri and Echo are close. They can finally understand what we say but still have trouble understanding what we mean.

It’s just that understanding natural language is really, really hard. It’s an example of the data problem at the core of Artificial Intelligence, and as AI eats the world, it’s going to be core to software development as well.

We help AI driven companies like chat bots to collect the training data they need more quickly and then manage that data to improve the intelligence of their products over time.

Our team is extremely mission driven, with graduate degrees’ from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Brown.

We’re going to make conversational computing a reality because I’m going blind and it’s the best way for me to keep doing what I’m doing.