I share short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
Your solution - the least important part of your pitch
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When pitching to investors, spend as little time as possible talking about your solution. Sounds counterintuitive? Imagine this: Turns out this mom learned about the solution from another parent in the class, and almost all the parents are already using it with similar results! The best part? It only costs $7.99 a month. At this point, you are probably itching to sign up, even though I haven't told you what the thing IS. Is it an app? A book? A course? A gadget? Investors sift through dozens of pitches, where the solutions change but what they are attuned to remains the same - a sense of opportunity. There’ll be plenty of time later for them to dig into the details of your solution, but in this initial pitch, they are focused on 'markers of opportunity' like relevance or credibility. Your solution? It needs to be there as context but more than that - it becomes a distraction. P.S. |
Creativity in Deep-Tech
I share short, partly visual emails, crafted through my lens as a creative director in deep-tech. Join me for insights on effective communication, marketing, design, psychology, and the philosophy of value.
Ask a founder why their solution is valuable, and the conversation often drifts toward money. I get it. Unlike value, money is objective, tangible, and measurable. But notice the circularity hidden in that reasoning. Why is my solution valuable? Because it will make money. Why will it make money? Because it does something valuable. That confusion is why so much investor communication feels like noise with little signal. Here's the thing.. Value and money are not the same thing. Value is the...
There are certain words that, as soon as you utter them, investor attention spikes. These words are not what you’d expect. They’re not buzzwords like “artificial intelligence” or “cybersecurity.” Nor are they money words - ARR, traction, or revenue to date. The magic words are: “Imagine you are…” Founders think they need a big story so they build their pitches almost entirely from abstractions and generalizations: The Problem, The market, the unmet need, the solution - trying to extract value...
In the previous newsletter, I shared a talk I gave at Nest Catalyst about investor pitching. That first talk focused on the mindset behind pitching complex ideas. This second talk is more practical. It focuses on how to approach shaping your pitch - through principles and examples. The last five minutes are especially practical: an easy framework to help you craft your narrative. This was quite challenging. After years of doing this work, a lot of it has become intuitive. Breaking it down to...