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Pitching Hacks: How to pitch startups to investors
How to raise money from VCs and angel investors. We’ve founded companies like Epinions; helped start companies that are backed by Sequoia, Benchmark, and Kleiner Perkins; raised $100M or so for startups; and invested another $20M in about 12 companies. This book summarizes some of the lessons we’ve learned about pitching companies to investors.
- GenresBusinessEntrepreneurship
86 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
8 people are currently reading
226 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 8, 2014
This is a great little book focusing on three things
- the high concept pitch
- the elevator pitch
- your deck
The book includes a great one page summary:
Pitching Hacks, in one page.
Don’t spam investors with your business plan. Instead, convince middlemen to introduce you to investors. An effective middleman is simply someone investors listen to — often another entrepreneur or investor.
Find middlemen by picking up the phone and calling everyone you know, who knows investors well, who will listen to you. Then use these tools to pitch middlemen and investors alike:
1. An elevator pitch. The major components of an elevator pitch are traction, product, team, and social proof. And investors care about traction over everything else.
2.Your elevator pitch should include a high-concept pitch: a single sentence that distills your startup’s vision. A highconcept pitch is the perfect meme for fans and investors who are spreading the word about your company.
3.Also consider sending investors a “ten-slide” deck that tells a compelling story about your team, product, traction, and plans.
4.You don’t need a “business plan.”
Finally, don’t ask for an NDA — investors won’t sign one. Your elevator pitch and deck probably won’t get in the hands of the competition, but you should assume they will. So don’t share information that must remain confidential.
Investors don’t invest in businesses. They invest in stories about businesses.
You can tell a story in a sentence; you can tell a story in a paragraph; and you can tell a story in a 20-minute pitch. Startups need to do all three.
With modifications, you can also use these techniques to pitch prospective employees, partners, customers, and anyone else you seek to influence.
Many of the ideas in this book first appeared on venturehacks.com — that was our first draft. With the feedback of our readers and beta testers, we have created this book — a second draft
Traction is a measure of your product’s engagement with its market. Investors care about traction over everything else.
Traction is a measure of your product’s engagement with its market, a.k.a. product/market fit. In order of importance, it is demonstrated through profit, revenue, customers, pilot customers, non-paying users, and verified hypotheses about customer problems. And their rates of change.
Convince middlemen to introduce you to investors. An effective middleman is simply someone investors listen to.
Pick up the phone and call everyone you know, who knows investors well, and will listen to you. Call in all your favors to get the attention of middlemen.
Distill your company’s vision into a single phrase or sentence. A high-concept pitch is the perfect meme for fans and investors who are spreading the word about your company.
First, the pitch should be brief.
Second, your audience should already understand the building blocks of the pitch.
Third, the pitch probably isn’t your company’s tagline.
HIGH-CONCEPT PITCH is the best way to describe your product and vision within an elevator pitch
The rest of the elevator pitch should be devoted to your traction, product, team, and social proof.
ELEVATOR PITCHES An introduction captures an investor’s attention, but a great elevator pitch gets a meeting. The major components of the elevator pitch are traction, product, team, and social proof.
DECKS An introduction and elevator pitch are critical to getting a meeting. Also consider providing a “ten-slide” deck that tells a compelling story about your team, product, traction, and plans.
1.Cover. Include your logo, tagline, and complete contact information.
2.Summary. Summarize the key, compelling facts of the company. Make sure you cover all the topics that are in your elevator pitch — in fact, just steal the content from the elevator pitch.
3.Team. Highlight the past accomplishments of the team.
4.Problem. Describe the customer, market, and problem you address, without getting into your product. Emphasize the pain level and the inability of competitors to satisfy the need.
5.Solution. Introduce your product and its benefits and describe how it addresses the problem you just described. Include a demo such as a screencast, a link to working software, or pictures. God help you if you have nothing to show.
6.Technology. Describe the technology behind your solution. Focus on how the technology enables the differentiated aspects of your solution. If appropriate, mention patent status.
7.Marketing. Who are the customers? How big is the market? You summarized this in your Problem slide and this is your opportunity to elaborate. How are you going to acquire customers? What customers have you already acquired?
8.Sales. What’s your business model? If you have sales, discuss the sales you’ve made and your pipeline. What are the microeconomics and macroeconomics that turn your business into a $X million revenue business? Emphasize the microeconomics (each user is worth $1/year because…) instead of the macroeconomics (if we can get 1% of a $10B market…).
9.Competition. Describe why customers use your product instead of the competition’s. Describe any competitive advantages that remain after the competition decides to copy you exactly. Never deny that you have competitors — it's okay to compete. Against anyone.
10.Milestones. Describe your current status and prospective milestones for the next 1-3 quarters for your product, team, marketing, and sales. Use a table with the quarters on the xaxis and the functions on the y-axis. Also include quarterly and cumulative gross burn (your expenses, assuming zero revenue) for the next 1-3 quarters. Don’t build a detailed f inancial model if you don’t have past earnings, a significant f inancial history, or insight into the issue. What hypotheses did you test in the last round of financing and what were the results? What hypotheses will you test with this round?
11.Conclusion. This slide can be inspirational, a larger vision of what the company could accomplish if these current plans are realized, or a rehash of the Summary slide.
12.Financing. Dates, amounts, and sources of money raised. How much money are you raising in this round? Restate the hypotheses that you will test in this round.
Jason Calacanis’ excellent “How To Demo Your Startup” for ideas on pitching in person: http://bit.ly/Uw4h and http://bit.ly/ hUTy.
E-mail investors a PDF that combines each slide and its notes on a single page — slide on top, notes on bottom.
Obey the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It's quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.
A sales pitch is not a business plan
Don’t ask for an NDA — investors won't sign one.
Investors don’t want to get sued if they fund your competitor — so they don’t sign NDAs.
Your deck probably won’t get in the hands of the competition, but you should assume it will.
Write, “Proprietary and Confidential. Please do not distribute. Prepared for Blue Shirt Capital,” on the cover of your deck (some entrepreneurs write it on every page).
A referral is the single most powerful way to get into a VC firm. Most of their deals come from people they trust. If you can, go through this method, it works.
Make sure you follow and contribute to blogs like venturehacks.com and get people’s blog reading lists so you know what blogs to follow
Why startup pitches fail (and how to fix them) by Eric Ries
venturehacks.com/articles/why-pitches...
Raising Money Using Customer Development by Steve Blank
steveblank.com/2009/11/05/raising-mon...
How To Demo Your Startup by Jason Calacanis
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/09/...
Pitch yourself, not your idea by Chris Dixon
The story you should tell is the story of someone who has been building stuff her whole life and now just needs some capital to take it to the next level.
http://cdixon.org/2009/11/14/pitch-yo...
How to Present at Big Meetings without Going Down a Rat Hole by Mark Suster
Before a partner's meeting, know who is coming, their views, how they act, their relationships, and whether they know your market.
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/20...
AngelList - A list of angel investors venturehacks.com/angellist
StartupList - We intro you to angels venturehacks.com/startuplist
STARTUP RESOURCES
VC and startup blogs that we read.
Venture Hacks venturehacks.com
twitter.com/venturehacks
Must read
Fred Wilson – A VC avc.com
Marc Andreessen pmarca-archive.posterous.com
Paul Graham paulgraham.com/articles.html
37signals 37signals.com/svn
Eric Ries – Startup Lessons Learned startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com
More to read
Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson – Ask the VC askthevc.com
Dharmesh Shah – On startups onstartups.com
Josh Kopelman – Redeye VC redeye.firstround.com
David Hornik – VentureBlog ventureblog.com
Naval Ravikant – StartupBoy startupboy.com
Should be posting more often
Bill Burnham – Burnham’s Beat tinyurl.com/4jb4mt
David Cowan – Who Has Time For This? whohastimeforthis.com
Steve Barsh – Barsh Bits blog.stevebarsh.com
Lawyers
Yoichiro “Yokum” Taku – Startup Company Lawyer startupcompanylawyer.com
Up-and-comers
Mike Speiser – Laserlike laserlike.com
Steve Blank steveblank.com
Comedy
Venture Capital Wear vcwear.com
Navi is at nivi.com
NAVAL RAVIKANT startupboy.com
- the high concept pitch
- the elevator pitch
- your deck
The book includes a great one page summary:
Pitching Hacks, in one page.
Don’t spam investors with your business plan. Instead, convince middlemen to introduce you to investors. An effective middleman is simply someone investors listen to — often another entrepreneur or investor.
Find middlemen by picking up the phone and calling everyone you know, who knows investors well, who will listen to you. Then use these tools to pitch middlemen and investors alike:
1. An elevator pitch. The major components of an elevator pitch are traction, product, team, and social proof. And investors care about traction over everything else.
2.Your elevator pitch should include a high-concept pitch: a single sentence that distills your startup’s vision. A highconcept pitch is the perfect meme for fans and investors who are spreading the word about your company.
3.Also consider sending investors a “ten-slide” deck that tells a compelling story about your team, product, traction, and plans.
4.You don’t need a “business plan.”
Finally, don’t ask for an NDA — investors won’t sign one. Your elevator pitch and deck probably won’t get in the hands of the competition, but you should assume they will. So don’t share information that must remain confidential.
Investors don’t invest in businesses. They invest in stories about businesses.
You can tell a story in a sentence; you can tell a story in a paragraph; and you can tell a story in a 20-minute pitch. Startups need to do all three.
With modifications, you can also use these techniques to pitch prospective employees, partners, customers, and anyone else you seek to influence.
Many of the ideas in this book first appeared on venturehacks.com — that was our first draft. With the feedback of our readers and beta testers, we have created this book — a second draft
Traction is a measure of your product’s engagement with its market. Investors care about traction over everything else.
Traction is a measure of your product’s engagement with its market, a.k.a. product/market fit. In order of importance, it is demonstrated through profit, revenue, customers, pilot customers, non-paying users, and verified hypotheses about customer problems. And their rates of change.
Convince middlemen to introduce you to investors. An effective middleman is simply someone investors listen to.
Pick up the phone and call everyone you know, who knows investors well, and will listen to you. Call in all your favors to get the attention of middlemen.
Distill your company’s vision into a single phrase or sentence. A high-concept pitch is the perfect meme for fans and investors who are spreading the word about your company.
First, the pitch should be brief.
Second, your audience should already understand the building blocks of the pitch.
Third, the pitch probably isn’t your company’s tagline.
HIGH-CONCEPT PITCH is the best way to describe your product and vision within an elevator pitch
The rest of the elevator pitch should be devoted to your traction, product, team, and social proof.
ELEVATOR PITCHES An introduction captures an investor’s attention, but a great elevator pitch gets a meeting. The major components of the elevator pitch are traction, product, team, and social proof.
DECKS An introduction and elevator pitch are critical to getting a meeting. Also consider providing a “ten-slide” deck that tells a compelling story about your team, product, traction, and plans.
1.Cover. Include your logo, tagline, and complete contact information.
2.Summary. Summarize the key, compelling facts of the company. Make sure you cover all the topics that are in your elevator pitch — in fact, just steal the content from the elevator pitch.
3.Team. Highlight the past accomplishments of the team.
4.Problem. Describe the customer, market, and problem you address, without getting into your product. Emphasize the pain level and the inability of competitors to satisfy the need.
5.Solution. Introduce your product and its benefits and describe how it addresses the problem you just described. Include a demo such as a screencast, a link to working software, or pictures. God help you if you have nothing to show.
6.Technology. Describe the technology behind your solution. Focus on how the technology enables the differentiated aspects of your solution. If appropriate, mention patent status.
7.Marketing. Who are the customers? How big is the market? You summarized this in your Problem slide and this is your opportunity to elaborate. How are you going to acquire customers? What customers have you already acquired?
8.Sales. What’s your business model? If you have sales, discuss the sales you’ve made and your pipeline. What are the microeconomics and macroeconomics that turn your business into a $X million revenue business? Emphasize the microeconomics (each user is worth $1/year because…) instead of the macroeconomics (if we can get 1% of a $10B market…).
9.Competition. Describe why customers use your product instead of the competition’s. Describe any competitive advantages that remain after the competition decides to copy you exactly. Never deny that you have competitors — it's okay to compete. Against anyone.
10.Milestones. Describe your current status and prospective milestones for the next 1-3 quarters for your product, team, marketing, and sales. Use a table with the quarters on the xaxis and the functions on the y-axis. Also include quarterly and cumulative gross burn (your expenses, assuming zero revenue) for the next 1-3 quarters. Don’t build a detailed f inancial model if you don’t have past earnings, a significant f inancial history, or insight into the issue. What hypotheses did you test in the last round of financing and what were the results? What hypotheses will you test with this round?
11.Conclusion. This slide can be inspirational, a larger vision of what the company could accomplish if these current plans are realized, or a rehash of the Summary slide.
12.Financing. Dates, amounts, and sources of money raised. How much money are you raising in this round? Restate the hypotheses that you will test in this round.
Jason Calacanis’ excellent “How To Demo Your Startup” for ideas on pitching in person: http://bit.ly/Uw4h and http://bit.ly/ hUTy.
E-mail investors a PDF that combines each slide and its notes on a single page — slide on top, notes on bottom.
Obey the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It's quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.
A sales pitch is not a business plan
Don’t ask for an NDA — investors won't sign one.
Investors don’t want to get sued if they fund your competitor — so they don’t sign NDAs.
Your deck probably won’t get in the hands of the competition, but you should assume it will.
Write, “Proprietary and Confidential. Please do not distribute. Prepared for Blue Shirt Capital,” on the cover of your deck (some entrepreneurs write it on every page).
A referral is the single most powerful way to get into a VC firm. Most of their deals come from people they trust. If you can, go through this method, it works.
Make sure you follow and contribute to blogs like venturehacks.com and get people’s blog reading lists so you know what blogs to follow
Why startup pitches fail (and how to fix them) by Eric Ries
venturehacks.com/articles/why-pitches...
Raising Money Using Customer Development by Steve Blank
steveblank.com/2009/11/05/raising-mon...
How To Demo Your Startup by Jason Calacanis
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/09/...
Pitch yourself, not your idea by Chris Dixon
The story you should tell is the story of someone who has been building stuff her whole life and now just needs some capital to take it to the next level.
http://cdixon.org/2009/11/14/pitch-yo...
How to Present at Big Meetings without Going Down a Rat Hole by Mark Suster
Before a partner's meeting, know who is coming, their views, how they act, their relationships, and whether they know your market.
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/20...
AngelList - A list of angel investors venturehacks.com/angellist
StartupList - We intro you to angels venturehacks.com/startuplist
STARTUP RESOURCES
VC and startup blogs that we read.
Venture Hacks venturehacks.com
twitter.com/venturehacks
Must read
Fred Wilson – A VC avc.com
Marc Andreessen pmarca-archive.posterous.com
Paul Graham paulgraham.com/articles.html
37signals 37signals.com/svn
Eric Ries – Startup Lessons Learned startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com
More to read
Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson – Ask the VC askthevc.com
Dharmesh Shah – On startups onstartups.com
Josh Kopelman – Redeye VC redeye.firstround.com
David Hornik – VentureBlog ventureblog.com
Naval Ravikant – StartupBoy startupboy.com
Should be posting more often
Bill Burnham – Burnham’s Beat tinyurl.com/4jb4mt
David Cowan – Who Has Time For This? whohastimeforthis.com
Steve Barsh – Barsh Bits blog.stevebarsh.com
Lawyers
Yoichiro “Yokum” Taku – Startup Company Lawyer startupcompanylawyer.com
Up-and-comers
Mike Speiser – Laserlike laserlike.com
Steve Blank steveblank.com
Comedy
Venture Capital Wear vcwear.com
Navi is at nivi.com
NAVAL RAVIKANT startupboy.com
March 17, 2020
How to pitch investors and raise money for dummies.
Smart dummies too, who are compelled to over-complicate copy, product and deck.
With insights from Valley who's who, the aspiring founder ignores at their peril.
Smart dummies too, who are compelled to over-complicate copy, product and deck.
With insights from Valley who's who, the aspiring founder ignores at their peril.
November 3, 2015
Excellent book describing how to draft a high-concept pitch, elevator pitch and investor deck. No frills just the straight dope from those that have been there. Easy read, take notes.
May 30, 2015
The best part of this book is brevity.
January 11, 2016
Solid overview with great resources and quotes from the best in the biz at Angel.co
April 12, 2017
This little book is like a good pitch - the essence is said in as few words as possible.
Must read before pitching.
Must read before pitching.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews