Pitch perfect: Constructing the investor-winning pitch
Since opening the product management class back in 2017, we‘ve seen many great product managers come and go. They are all amazing and have brilliant ideas that lay as a foundation of innovative apps they develop. However, not all of them can deliver engaging pitch when demonstrating their apps. Some take too long only to introduce their team members, and the others use too many slides with incredibly small texts. According to Guy Kawasaki, a pitch should only have ten slides, lasts no more than twenty minutes, and contains no font smaller than thirty points.
To make matters simple, we’re gonna talk about how to powerfully present your product in a pitch, using the mix of story-telling and data.
“People don’t buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.” — Seth Godin
Focus on the “why” before the “how”
Steve Jobs was regarded as the world’s best speaker when it comes to a pitch presentation. He always opened his speech with compelling first words that made audience curious, “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along, that changes everything,” which at the same time, the audience was like, “This is it, this is it, we’re gonna witness a revolution.”
In the introduction of iPhone, he told the audience that Apple would launch 3 different products which were an iPod, a phone, and a new internet browser. He spent 2 minutes talking about these products, and suddenly, he confessed that these 3 were actually combined as one, which was an iPhone. Jobs also loved to use big words for Apple’s products, like “super product” and “magic” to emphasize his story-telling.
Instead of saying the features he would demonstrate, he told the benefits the user would get in one sentence. For example, Apple launched their first MacBook Air in 2008 which had 13.3-inch LED backlit display, a full-size keyboard, 1.6GHz processor, and a unibody aluminium design. However, the Apple’s founder didn’t go into the details of the spec, but he simply said, “In a sentence, it’s the world’s thinnest notebook,” before telling the details of how they managed to squeeze so much power into a thin computer.
Jobs said “1,000 songs in your pocket” not “Each iPod has 5GB storage”
In his slides, he didn’t put too many words, only graphics that supported his speech. Ken Kocienda, a former Apple engineer who worked there for 15 years expressed his amazement on Jobs’ pitch deck. “The slides have one or two words. He honed and refined and simplified his message so that he knew exactly what he wanted to say and could say so in as few as possible words and so people were not overwhelmed by too much message. It was very clear what the point was and then people got it.”
The early-stage-Facebook’s approach
In 2004, Facebook pitch’s deck was a basic media kit containing only company’s value proposition, key metrics, and online marketing services. Since they weren’t making any money back then, their pitch deck was based on stories behind their small but massively active user engagement. You can check their deck here.
Eduardo Saverin, well-known as the former CFO of Facebook, told a powerful story about how addictive thefacebook.com was for the Ivy League’s students. In his deck, the cofounder presented their observation of college students’ financial behavior and a series of validated demographic statistics of the untapped, potential users to the investors and advertisers to participate in their expansion. This engaging mixed approach is still kept until now as it’s a proven strategy to increase their brand value. Look at how Facebook’s brand value had grown as the time went by in the video below.
How to mix story-telling with data
Like an actual story, a story-telling pitch deck also needs a structure. In this article, we’re adopting the famous 3 act structure as the skeleton of constructing a pitch deck. The structure begins with intro, progressing through the development part which takes the most, and ends with an epilogue.
Step 1: The hard-hitting introduction
Every brilliant story kicks off with a powerful start. Lord of the Rings, through Galadriel’s tender voice, gently tells the origin of the One Ring in less than two minutes, but enough to build a comprehensive understanding that Sauron — with his ring — is a massive threat to the Middle Earth.
“The purpose of a pitch is to stimulate interest, not to cover every aspect of your startup and bludgeon your audience into submission.” — Guy Kawasaki
When constructing an intro, you’ll need to address how big the problem is for your targeted user. Therefore, develop a clear statement of the problems that bring the gap between stated expectation and reality. A good introduction should cover both the importance of solving the problem and how the impact will last if the problem isn’t solved. And to support your proposed problem, you need to strengthen your argument with a series of data. It would be easier to understand when you use quantitative data rather than the qualitative one. The data can be ranging from the behavior of your prospective user to the actual psychographic landscape of the industry. This is a brilliant example of how AirBnB use data to validate the importance of their product.
Step 2: The big chunk
With a strong explanation of the problem, you should be ready to move on to demonstrate the “how”. In this section, focus on the benefits your user will get, not the features. It will help investors or users to understand that your product is solving their problem in an intuitive way.
Next, it’s time to introduce your team! Investors would like to invest their money on the right people. That’s why showing the credibility of your team matters. Not only mentioning names and roles, you should also tell previous achievements and relevant expertise of your team members. If they’re still not convincing enough, try to include who your advisors, consultants, and even your board members are.
The upcoming slides would be the vision of your product. These contain all detailed plan, visualized in simple graphics. Beginning with a coast-to-coast business model, go-to-market plan, competitive analysis, key metrics, and the financial projections your product could make in a defined duration.
This section should also contain the climax of your pitch, and in this moment, you should be able to sell your product. If your product has early relations with reputable companies, input their logos. They can be anything, whether as your users (if your product is a B2B service), current investors, clients, partners, or media companies which reviewed your product. Then, you should have a dedicated slide that addresses your main objective of the pitch: a sum of money, a kind of the partnership, you name it. It will be much better to underline the key use of funds (technology, new hire, marketing expansion, etc.) and some major milestones you aim to achieve if the agreement is reached.
Step 3: The sucker punch
In the last slide, insert a killer quote, user testimonials, or press reviews, to cast a memorable finale. Steve Jobs was aware the stakes which depended on his pitch, so he decided to end his speeches with an inspirational quote that leaves everybody with a positive feeling.
The last but not least, as Jobs always did at the very end, without using prolonged additional sentences, simply thank your audience with “thank you very much” to create sympathy and to let them know you are done. Thank you very much.
Selling your product is not necessarily for founders to investor only, it can be applied to convince your supervisor of your product development, adding a simple feature for your app, perhaps. To boost your presentation skills, we offer a Binar Masterclass session that exclusively teaches you how to construct an attention-grabbing deck, as well as delivering powerful pitching speech. If you find yourself in need to enrich these skills, explore your opportunity here.
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