Pitch 10x Better - A Crash Course for Startup Founders

Investors and juries in your pitch session need just 30 seconds to decide to listen to you more or not. In this time, you should tell them what your startup is about and what you want them to hear. When you are leaving the stage, you do not want to see confused investors and juries with questions in their minds. Maybe you spend your years working for your startup but this is the rule of demo days: if you want to make a good impression, you should make an impressive introduction in this short period of time.

Now you have a good first slide and ou want to create a good first impression. The best way to do is telling a good story. To take your audience to other worlds, you can activate your audience's brain by letting out different hormones in their brains. When you master this technique, you will have focused, positive audience listening you. When you explain in the best way how you have improved people's lives or what problems you have solved, they will not only listen to you, but live with you.

It is unthinkable for an entrepreneur not to mention the size of the market while presenting her or his startup. What investors really want is to see if you are after a large enough market and you are knowledgeable about it. You should have a clear definition of your market and be able to technically classify the market you intend to serve. Even if you don't have exact numbers, you can make meaningful predictions. You should form an idea after making sure you are after a big enough market. Startup founders are the ones who pursue the big market and big effects.

You can think about why milkshakes are consumed so often and simply answer for yourself that there is nothing so practical, cold and sweet to eat, but when you research, you will see that when most of the customers are in a hurry, they want something fun and easy to get through a meal and their time in traffic.  Almost everyone has numerous problems in everyday life, for example you want to hang a poster on the wall, but you have nothing to pierce the wall. So you go out and you get a drill, we don't think anyone would want it where you stopped to buy a drill. In summary, customers give money to the solutions produced to problems rather than the product you produce. Therefore, in your presentation, it would be best to explain what problems you have solved as much as possible and how you did this, using technical documents if necessary.

Where there is competition, there is synergy, which is a sign that money can be made. If you say you are not competing, it means that you are either not in a big enough market, or you have no idea what you are doing as a founder. Competition gives you the chance to stand out, it proves that you can move fast and get ahead of the "first" company in the market, as well as "innovative", that you can stand out in front of the cumbersome 100-year-old companies. For this reason, you must dominate the competition in your market and show investors that you know this.

When it comes to a team, the first team that comes to mind and where there is an unsolvable problem is the A Team for most of you. So what sets the A Team apart from the others, and how is it related to startups and this issue? When you look at the members of the A Team, you will see that they all play a role. Some bring the team together and lead the works, while others are responsible for getting things done. There is definitely someone in the back who has brains for the team. We also see this as the ideal distribution in entrepreneurship under the names of Hacker, Hipster and Hustler. Of course, a team does not necessarily have to be 3 people, but having certain people in certain roles gives the team an advantage in dealing with problems. The situation that investors are looking for in teams and they like is that a good plan comes together with the appropriate A Team.

An entrepreneur not asking questions or asking for something after the presentation is often a miss of a big opportunity. There are many questions that investors ask themselves while listening to you. They will consider many questions such as whether your demands are within their competence or will they get enough of their investment. These questions are not that important if you have convinced people on the stage that you have come up with the right solution to the problem. But if you don't have a request, guess what this will bring to you? You may be lacking resources, or looking for new talent, or you may need the experience of the advisory board. If you want to be rewarded for these, try to convey your questions and requests in a complete and concrete way. It is clear that not asking is the wrong way to deal with this. For this reason, do not leave the stage without asking.

As an entrepreneur if you were not sure which topics you should develop yourself, Zillion Pitches will help you to learn those topics and make practice. You can learn from best pitches or you can understand other entrepreneurs' pitches from investors point of view. Also you can get feedback from other entrepreneurs. Moreover, Zillion Pitches' AI based algorithms will grade your pitch. We believe in crowd's voice as we believe in technology so you can experience both. Now start to examine other pitches and make your pitch better!

Here you can see the draft pitch and the basic story telling practices we trained you in. Pay attention to the testimonials, the MVP Screenshots and the Market Size slides especially. I'd like to also pay attention to competitors and the clean value proposition.

This is the casual feedback session of the same pitch in front of Tim Draper. It was nerve wrecking at first even for me who is very experienced in giving feedback. Pay attention to the missing elements in the pitch.