Pitch Rescue: Five Investor Presentation Pitfalls to Avoid
By Joseph Flaherty, Director of Content & Community
I have the great privilege of seeing a lot of startup pitch decks and have noticed a few common narrative patterns that are counterproductive for otherwise interesting companies. If you’re getting ready to pitch a VC, try to avoid these traps.
🌤️☁️ Head in Clouds, Feet MIA 👞👟
Vision is important. However, some founders try to sell a pure narrative, predicated on a contentious and unproven thesis, about a speculative user behavior change or tech breakthrough. It’s all 30,000-foot views with no takeoff/landing
Why this pitch fails:
This approach usually fails when the VC disagrees with one of the entrepreneur’s foundational arguments and the conversation derails into an evidence-free discussion about philosophy rather than entrepreneurship.
📊📈 Data Overload 📉💹
Some founders have a tendency to let market size stand in for a business plan and bombard audiences with stats, e.g.:
“This market is worth $100B+ and these 10 charts prove it!”
“There are millions, nay, billions of potential users!”
Why this pitch fails:
A substantial Total Addressable Market (TAM) is necessary but not sufficient. Focusing on TAM makes sense if a startup is in a truly odd category, but belaboring the point makes a deck feel more like a book report.
👋👋 The Never-ending Demo 👋👋
Few things are more compelling than a stellar product demo. Few things are more worrying than realizing every question is answered by citing a product feature. At the very earliest stage, this is ok, but VCs fund companies, not products.
Why this pitch fails:
Focusing exclusively on product is typically a sign of an inexperienced founder who doesn’t yet appreciate the importance of distribution channels, sales strategy, and so on. Product is just one piece of the puzzle!
🥚👶 The Autobiography 🤦👴
There’s a temptation to present a startup pitch chronologically:
“Pat and I have known each other since 3rd grade…Our 1st startup was a consumer app…Now we’re doing B2B SaaS…”
And so on for 20 minutes until someone looks at a clock.
Why this pitch fails:
It’s easy to get lost in a flow of personal minutiae and squander half the meeting in this mode. History is important, but it’s often best saved for a second meeting once the investor is bought into the company’s mission.
📝📝 The Checklist 📝📝
There are a lot of good resources instructing founders about what to include in a deck, but following that template slavishly…
Here’s our market slide…
Here’s our product slide…
Here’s our team slide…
…is a mistake.
Why this pitch fails:
It’s the difference between a bowl of flour, eggs, and milk..and a cake.
In a good pitch, all the slides work together like a recipe. It explains how team influences product which determines business model. It feels like the founders cracked a code.
The takeaway is that a good pitch needs *ALL* of these elements — vision, product, market, team, and structure. If one aspect dominates, the entire pitch suffers.
Have you seen any others?
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