Can You Pitch Your Startup Effectively and Concisely?

A great pitch is not about telling your story — it's about making investors feel what your product does in the shortest possible time.

Jason's rules for pitching

Get to the product in 15 seconds. Don't spend the first two slides on market size or team backgrounds. Show the thing you built as fast as possible.

Examples matter. Describe real people using the product. Concrete examples stick; abstract descriptions don't.

Synchronicity. Whatever you're saying should match what's on the screen at that moment. Talking about retention while showing a feature slide breaks the spell.

One slide, one message. Keep it simple and keep the slides moving. A crowded slide signals confused thinking.

Show, don't tell. Performance data, customer logos, and process steps beat walls of text and vague claims. Show the product in action — a 60-second demo clip inside a deck outperforms any bullet point.

The one simple sentence

From checklist item #22: every startup needs an OSS — One Simple Sentence explaining what you do.

• No jargon.
• No marketing-speak.
• Just say what your company does in the most basic way possible.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough yet.

Get the team involved

The founder should not build the pitch deck alone. Bring in the people who know the details:

• Sales provides input on the go-to-market and traction slides.
• Engineering provides input on the product and technical slides.

Every person with important insight into a section of the business should have a hand in that section of the deck.

The LAUNCH Accelerator approach

At the LAUNCH Accelerator, a core part of the programme is helping founders perfect their three-minute pitch to investors — and training them on how to answer investor questions in real time. If you haven't had someone put you through that process, find a trusted peer to run mock Q&A sessions with you before your first investor meeting.