Cat Washing Machines: Crafting a Powerful Opening for Your Startup Pitch
In my role as a startup advisor I have heard literally thousands of pitches — sometimes hundreds at a time in the pre-screening for pitch competitions. When you see so many of them all at once you see more clearly which formulas and templates are over-used and should be retired.
“Begin with a statistic…” they often say. “Begin with an anecdote…” they say, too. But what they should perhaps add is “…but don’t do it every time.”
Rather than following a template or a formula it is more effective to begin with the strongest part of your pitch. Sometimes that might still be a surprising statistic, and sometimes it might be an amazing anecdote. But you can also make many pitches impactful and memorable simply by saying what you do, very concisely, right at the start.
Suppose that an entrepreneur has founded a startup to bring to market a machine for washing housecats. I have a horrible feeling that they are going to begin their pitch with something like “Did you know that 38% of house cats are dirty?”. No, but we don’t. And we don’t find that exciting. Either that or they begin with “When I was a little girl my house cat was always dirty…” Maybe that was a winning formula once, but now it is like the amazing song that everyone played until they were sick of it.
This is one of those cases where it might be better to begin by saying directly “We have developed a safe and cost-effective machine for cleaning house cats. Pre-production models have already been delivered to the first 100 customers and we are looking for investors to begin production.”
After that you can bring out the statistics and maybe even the childhood anecdote, but with a disruptive new product like a cat washing machine you will get attention sooner by not making people wait a long time to find out what you do.
Any startup pitch can be improved by making the ‘who does what for who’ part much clearer and bringing it closer to the beginning. Even if you have exciting statistics and anecdotes at the beginning, they will lost their impact if they are too far from this essential explanation. You don’t even need to ask test audiences if the pitch is not clear enough. Just watch the audience. If you can see question mark faces you can tell that they are not following you and you know that your story needs tightening up.
Convincing someone to give you money is hard enough, but don’t make it harder by being vague about what you do. And sometimes the most impactful start is to begin with your own equivalent of “we make machines for washing cats…”. Try it sometime!
