Startup Secrets Sandbox

Perfect Your Fundraising Pitch

Workbook: Perfect Your Fundraising Pitch

This workbook is primarily oriented to fundraising, though the Startup Secrets and frameworks are designed to help you think for yourself to prepare a story for any audience. In fact thanks to engaging millions of people over the years, and with so much great feedback (thank you!) we are evolving it with new frameworks, canvases and tools to help you build a pitch for any audience on any occasion. Check back here regularly for updates!

Tell a Story

An often overlooked—but extremely important—aspect of a pitch is storytelling.

Chances are, a pitch will be boring unless you can turn it into a story. How did you find this opportunity? Why are you personally inspired to go after it? What challenges are you overcoming? What customer are you servicing, and why do they matter? Where’s the emotion?

Try to make it like a movie script, with heroes, villains, journeys, and emotion. Bring it to life, but keep it authentic.

Process

Entrepreneurs have a tendency to cram too much information into one pitch deck. Instead, simplify and focus.

Think about: What is your intended next step? Just like a B2B sales process, you could plan a series of engagements over a certain timeframe. For example:

Engage with an investor on social media

Meet them at a conference

Ask an “elevator question” to pique their interest

see

Article: Elevator question⁠

⁠

Give a casual overview of the problem you’re solving

Give your initial pitch

Move forward to a second meeting

Get to due diligence

For each of the potential steps above, what information can you share to get to that next step? Present only the information needed to drive that action. No more, no less.

To take some of the guesswork out of early-stage fundraising, we pulled together an

editable Seed pitch deck template⁠

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