Good pitches are about a conversation, not a presentation!

{Preamble: “I’m going back to the roots of Seattle 2.0. When it got started I would write my own experience building my startup. Then we brought more contributors and I focused more on writing ‘general’ or ‘analysis’ post. Now that I’m back at building a startup from scratch, I’m full of topics to write about so I’ll document my venture as many of the contributors here.”}

When I joined forces with my co-founder, we didn’t have a clear picture of the solution we were creating. Heck, we weren’t even 100% sure of the problem we were tackling. We had developed, deployed and tested a pilot with a strategic partner. Instead of telling us which direction to go, that pilot told us there were many problems that we could address. There were a handful of very important problems around health and technology that we could tackle successfully, always around getting people doing more physical activity.

The more we talked about it and brainstormed problems and solutions, the more we narrowed the problem statement and had a better understanding of the core solution that was needed.

 

About four weeks ago we started to pitch our idea to a few VCs and Angel Investors. However, we took a very different route from your typical investor pitch. In a way, it could even be considered a gamble. But instead of going to VCs and telling them “this is what we are doing, take it or leave it”, we went there and we pitched a broad problem and an “open ended” solution. In other words, we looked somewhat unsure of what we are doing, on purpose.

The key to build a successful business is more than building a successful product. You have to build a successful marketing strategy, sales strategy, financing strategy, recruiting, and a lot more. So part of our financing strategy was to understand, from an investor perspective, what they liked and what they didn’t like about what we are doing. What were their bias, understanding of the health/insurance industry, pre-conceived notions about successes and failures on this industry, etc.

I can tell you a big difference between pitching this style, versus pitching “we-have-all-the-answers” style. First, once we present yourself in a “vulnerable” and non-pretentious ways (but showing knowledge and intelligence), people are a lot more likely to give you honest feedback. They don’t feel annoyed by you and they enjoy the conversion.

Second, and the most important of this style of presenting, is putting investors into a brainstorming mode. That’s a beautiful thing when it happens. If you ever pitched to any investor, you got one of two styles of responses:

A) Dismissive (“I’m not interested,” “You need more traction”, etc.) or destructive (“This won’t work because of Y”, “You’ll never get people to do Z”, etc.), or;

B) Problem-solving (“This won’t work, but what if you do Z?”, “You can solve X by doing a partnership with Y”, “I like W, but I would prefer if you had W+K”)

The key of a successful pitch is to put investors in Problem-solving mode. Not only you increase the likelihood of them investing on you, but more importantly you get extremely valuable feedback and lessons you take to your next pitch and ideas to incorporate into your product and business.

 

 

Zhang Ziyi Nikki Reed Natasha Bedingfield Audrina Patridge Simone Mütherthies