How to pitch your startup in one sentence

As a startup founder, it’s essential to be able to explain what you’re startup does in a short, clear and concise way.

If you can’t explain the essence of your startup in at least one sentence then you can’t expect your audience to get it. Whether that’s a VC, potential employee, customer or someone at an event asking the ‘so what do you do?’ question.

A one-sentence pitch is a hook that should pique the interest of your audience. And entice them to want to learn more about you and your startup.

At Startupbootcamp and Fast Track Malmö, I’ve heard a lot of pitches. Here is a simple formula put forward by Adeo Ressi of The Founder Institute.

“My company, _(insert name of company)_, is developing _(a defined offering)_ to help _(a defined audience)_ _(solve a problem)_ with _(secret sauce)_”.

This is far easier said than done. Boiling down the essence of your idea into a simple to understand way can be difficult. I see this more often with technical founders, drifting into complicated technical explanations. Oblivious to their audience glazing over.

Check out Adeo’s explainer video below.

I recommend testing your one-sentence pitch on friends, family or anyone that will listen. The more you refine and practice the pitch the easier it will become. Remember how you say it can be as important as what you say.

A one-sentence pitch can be a stand-alone statement or used as the opening for other pitches. I’ll cover these in future posts.

Fast Track Malmö is a startup accelerator in Malmö, Sweden. The spring batch for 2016 was selected from over 250 applications and has startups in AI, edtech, bitcoin, data analytics and sales.

Follow Fast Track Malmö on Twitter & Angel.co

Original post by Alexander Bastien here.