STOP — You don’t need pitch training!
All you need to prepare the perfect pitch for investors is this 29min video.
Recently it feels like I can’t go a day without seeing an advert for a ‘pitch training sessions’ or Meetups where inexperienced founders can ‘hone their pitches with experts’. I’m not sure if this is a general trend or just localised to Switzerland (where I live), but I hope it dies out soon.
As someone who has raised multiple rounds of investor money and pitched to hundreds of investors over the past three years (despite being a terrible public speaker), then please take it from me: If you are an inexperienced founder and are considering paying for (or even attending for free) a pitch workshop — don’t!
Don’t spend days crafting your pitch. It might feel important and be fun, but you’re learning bad habits and wasting time that could be spent on sales or product. The single best thing you can do to increase the chance of finding investor money is to work on your startup (sales, product), not spending money and/or time on a pitch.
That said, I’m not denying that having a great pitch is important — it’s just that doing a pitch training or workshop with an ‘expert’ (at least in Switzerland, in my experience) isn’t going to get you a good pitch that works on investors.
Instead, my (strongly recommended) tip for you is to watch this video of Michael Seibel from Y Combinator Startup School 2014 (embedded below). In total, the relevant part of the video (including role play examples) lasts just under thirty minutes and contains everything you really need to know about pitching to investors. More importantly, it doesn’t contain any incorrect or unhelpful information which you don’t need to think about.
So, founders — watch the video, spend an hour or two adapting it to your startup, check with a few friends that what you’ve prepared makes sense (especially the first sentence!) and then get back to work!
