Rehearse the pitch against a room that argues back
I have to defend this pitch out loud, and nobody has ever pushed back on it.
Everyone who has read your deck likes you
The people who have seen the pitch so far are a co-founder, two advisers, and whoever you sat next to at an event. They are on your side. They read the deck the way you meant it to be read, they filled in the gaps in your favour, and they told you it was strong.
An investor does none of that. They read for the thing that is missing, they interrupt on slide four, and the question they ask is the one you decided not to put on a slide. The first time you say the answer out loud should not be in that room.
Rehearsing by reading the deck again does not help, because reading is not the failure mode. The failure mode is being stopped halfway through a sentence, giving an answer that is worse than the one you had written, and then not finding your way back to the argument.
What the room does with a pitch
You write the brief first. The advisers read it before the room opens, and they do not share a view of what matters. One of them is looking at whether the cash survives the plan. One is looking at whether the thing you are building holds up when it is used. One is looking at whether anybody will switch to it, and what it costs them to switch.
They argue with you and with each other, out loud, one at a time. When you speak, whoever is talking stops. The disagreement between them is the part worth listening to: where two of them price the same assumption differently, that assumption is the one carrying your raise.
Each adviser carries a blind spot it was given on purpose, published rather than hidden, so the others have something true to attack. That is what stops the advisers becoming restatements of the same objection.
The investor pitch brief
A founder with a meeting in the diary and a pitch that has only ever been read by people who like them.
- The single sentence you open with, written exactly as you will say it.
- What you are raising, on what terms, and what the money buys.
- The number in the deck you are least able to defend, and why it is there.
- The competitor a sceptical investor will name, and your honest answer.
- What has to be true about the market for this plan to work at all.
- The question you are hoping nobody asks.
The advisers read this before the room opens and arrive with opposed priorities. One will price the cash position, one the delivery risk, one the distribution story. Expect the question you were hoping nobody asks to be asked in the first few minutes, out loud, while you are speaking.
Not yet produced
The strip for this use case, cut from a session about this kind of problem. No session of any kind has been recorded, so there is nothing to cut, and a reconstruction of a use case we have never seen anyone attempt would be an invention rather than an illustration.
Before you start
A session is one room, from brief to transcript, and it is the unit everything is priced in. End your first one inside 5 minutes and we refund it in full. If it turns out that arguing with the advisers about your pitch is not useful, you will know well inside that window.
How the room decides who speaks, and what happens when you interrupt