---
title: "Can You Pitch Your Startup Effectively and Concisely?"
section: "Fundraising"
sectionId: "fundraising"
date: "2026-05"
---

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.