Pitching for fun(ding) and profit

Building the confidence to launch a start-up requires quite a few things. The top two for me are: a strong mindset and a strong plan. Pitching is where your plan will be shown to a prospective buyer, so it has to be tremendous.

I wrote about mindset in a separate post so this post is about solid pitching tactics. I’ve pitched dozens of successful projects across video games, music videos, websites and more. This post is written for video game pitches, but I’ve seen the same tactics work in other ventures as well. Whether you are pitching on a crowdfunding platform, to a publisher or to a family member, here are 9 crucial things to consider.:

0) If you aren’t passionate about the idea you’re pitching, don’t pitch.

The audience will pick up on it, and the pitch is dead. Period.

You don’t have to be overly enthusiastic or an extrovert; it’s about being passionate about the creative or business opportunity you are presenting.

1) Identify the audience of the pitch and make it for them.

Are you pitching a publisher for money or to a relative to invest? Are you pitching to convince your friends to join your venture, or is this going to a crowdfunding platform?

What you pitch should be different depending on the audience, especially because you probably will have to pitch to different audiences at different times. That means multiple versions of the pitch.

The audience could be used to seeing pitches in a particular way, so do your homework. Ask colleagues that have pitched to them before or research online. Http://slideshare.net has some excellent references across industries.

The visuals should be getting the audience excited and building confidence that the idea is appealing and sellable to a customer. If you aren’t a graphic designer, it’s probably a good idea to hire one on 99Designs or equivalent. The more real your pitch feels, the more real the idea appears for funding consideration. Start with a solid baseline template then invest in key art, infographics or whatever other elements will help communicate the vision and intent. Http://elements.envato.com/ has some excellent resources.

2) Clarify the outcome you want out of the pitch.

As you develop the pitch, ask yourself, “Does this slide support the outcome I want?” It’s easy to bloat a pitch and get off topic, especially if you are excited about the idea. Be clear on what the vision of the product is.

Is it clear that you want X amount of money to make the whole product or just a seed amount to get to a minimum viable product? Make sure “the ask”, is very clear and well supported throughout the presentation.

3) Have a one-liner that’s compelling and can travel by word of mouth.

Saying your game is “Game of Thrones but set in the future with space pirates” is clearer than “it’s an epic opera where this queen dies and leaves the throne open for five other people that are trying for it. Oh, and they are space pirates, and I have a huge backstory, if you have an hour”. Don’t do that.

Most people don’t care about the inner details of your story in the first few slides or minutes of your presentation; they just want to figure out what you are excited about and why. And if it will sell.

Almost everything is derivative of something else. Embrace that. Use it to precisely communicate the appeal of your idea.

Clarity travels well. The person you are selling to may have to turn around and sell it to their boss. Having a clear and exciting one-liner ensures it will travel well throughout an organization.

4) Study the competitors and communicate what you are doing the same and differently.

Become very familiar with competing products. Do other games in your space only have five levels? Did they all launch with a small early access period, or were they full featured at launch?

A company looking to fund your idea looks at how it fits into the market. Study the blogs of people that have made a product similar to your game. See if any info or tips stick out.

Some publishers expect you to do a competitive analysis as part of the pitch. Be ready to talk not just about how cool your idea is but why in X years, when this game comes out, it will be a worthy investment for everyone involved.

Someone (and it should probably be you) is going to run the numbers and figure out how well your product will do theoretically compared to similar games in the market. The challenge will be finding sales data for those other games, but if you are making a game for PC, use Steamspy to get a sense of how many units your competitors have sold.

This estimate won’t be exact as Steamspy is only partially accurate, but it’s better than doing nothing! Here’s how we do it:

• Look for the number of owners on the competitor’s game. Let’s say it’s 100,000 for example.
• Not factoring sales or returns, let’s say this game sold for $20.
$20 x 100,000 units = $2,000,000 revenue.
• Steam store takes probably around 30%, so $2,000,000–30% = $1,400,000 net. That’s the highest possible amount of revenue assuming no in-game purchases.
• To factor in sales, you can study the sales history of the game, but for the sake of this example, I’ll say that half of the purchases were at a 50% off sale. The total net now is $1,050,000.

Do this for 1–3 other games to get an average net. Make sure to get the most successful game in this category as well, to see what the best case is for your game. But assume that you will fall somewhere in the middle to bottom. Most games do. Mostly on the bottom though (too bad, so sad!).

Once that’s done, compare it to your planned budget. How does it net out? Does this look like a good business opportunity to you, or would you not invest? Can you cut scope, or change your approach to lower your planned development costs?

Also consider which games on Steam, or your target platform, are getting marketing support. Will you have marketing support? This is huge and worth its one article, but I just mention it briefly here.

5) Showcase the team and why they are the best people to make this product.

Everyone has at least one amazing idea they’ve been scheming on making a reality. Not everyone has access to the best people to make that idea happen.

As you are building the confidence to strike out on your own, start talking to people you think would be the best fit for your new venture. Gauge their interest in joining you. Once they start committing, showcase them on the pitch.

One of the main goals of the pitch is to build confidence. Showing brief bios for the top two to four people on the team helps do that. Focus the bios on why this team is the best team (or at least a very competent one) to make this specific product.

Building the right team is probably the hardest part. Most publishers know this. Be honest and add color to your oral pitches. If your lead artist is currently employed and doesn’t feel comfortable with leaving her job till you get funding, you can mention that if the topic comes up. Be open about your situation as you’ll need that honesty in the relationship.

Be careful not to burden a publisher with your problems. Once they start funding, almost everything is your problem; not theirs. It’s on you to deliver results. That said, it’s usually ok to share the struggle. A mature publisher has seen and heard everything before. If you are acting as if everything is going perfectly all the time, it might cause some red flags because that never happens!

6) The team is more than just the developers.

Who is going to do your accounting, your legal advisement, or any other unique function that’s directly or indirectly involved in your project or business?

Chances are that you will be filling in quite a few roles to start. It’s helpful to identify all of those and get a sense of what your workload is going to be outside of the actual development of your product. If this is your first time running a business, the person you are pitching might ask you about this. Think through the business roles a bit before you pitch. Here’s my list:

• Accounting/CPA
• Book-keeping (Are you the one tagging the expense categories?)
• Business Advisor (Know anyone who’s been there, done that?)
• HR (Payroll, benefits setup and compliance)
• Insurance (Office and Errors & Omissions)
• Legal (Be organized to save billable hours.)
• Office Management (Are you the one ordering everything for the office?)
• Recruitment (Using a headhunter or job postings?)
• Social Media (It’s a full-time job)
• Technical Advisor (Are you sure everything you are pitching is technically possible?)

You may not know someone for each of these categories. If not, assign yourself and begin researching. Just because you don’t know someone doesn’t mean you don’t need to cover these knowledge bases.

7) Practice and polish your pitch.

You should be honing your pitch and seeing who is enthusiastic about it. If you can’t get three of your friends excited about it, is the idea worth showing yet? Ideally, these three friends are the ones you want to join your venture. Maybe show them after you have it refined a bit so you don’t scare them away on your early drafts.

Keep refining and crystallizing your ideas and imagery.

Make it clear on why you guys and gals are the ones that are destined to make this game.

Make sure that you and your team’s voices are coming through in the pitch. If you are pitching a publisher, they’ve probably seen something similar to your idea before. Since that’s probably the case, then communicating why you are passionate or the best team to make this game could give you the edge.

8) Prototype?

If you are a new team or working on something that’s hard to understand, you may want to consider showing a prototype as well. The downside of this is that the showable product invites way more criticism and might make the publisher say “no” more easily. They may not be seeing the potential the same way you are.

That said, if you have an idea that’s so heavily reliant on fun and bouncy physics and you have solid physics code that’s demo-able, consider showing it. Be careful though. Clarify the intention of showing a prototype and make sure you are communicating the intent as you demo it.

9) The actual plan.

In this next post, I write about many gory details for what your actual plan should be considering.

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