What Founder Pitches Reveal Before the Numbers Do
Practical tips you should consider
Hi friend,
How are you? Good to see you here.
Last week I attended eMerge Americas in Miami. It’s the top tech conference in town that happens every Spring - now for the 11th year!
You see, for the past six years, I’ve been serving as a certified startup mentor with the Venture Mentoring Team, a non-profit organization that coaches founders around the world.
So, this year, at eMerge Founders’ Day, I mentored a few startups and also watched their performance during the competition rounds.
A few trends surfaced.
Personal Story
The first few seconds are crucial. This is when you build your first impression with your audience.
There are several approaches to max impact:
One approach is to start with an emotional story about why you started the business. One founder told a story about his grandfather’s mobility difficulties, which inspired him to develop a mechanical chair.
Impactful story that solidified his personal motivation to launch the business, and in the process, humanized his business approach to boost likability.
A startup I mentored updated its pitch with this approach and received an immediate positive signal from judges.
Questions
Another one is to start by firing bold questions related to the founder’s business. This way, achieving common ground is fast.
It typically goes like this:
Quick show of hands—who here is already tracking your health with an app or wearable?
And how many of you feel like it’s actually helped you build lasting habits?
(fewer hands go up)
Right.
Nearly 50% of users stop using health apps within a short period of time.
We help turn health data into habits that stick.
It works because you lead the audience to your proof point from the onset and build an empathy bridge right away.
This simple simulation involving the audience gets you faster to answering:
Why Now? Why Me?
Your brand is one of the last true moats. Better tech can be replicated. Brand trust is built over time. Is your team ready to strengthen authentic storytelling with AI?
Explore my advisory partnership.
Design
Another trend I noticed is the various slide designs.
One startup had so many busy slides with a small font size that, at some point, I gave up looking at their slides and just focused on the verbal delivery.
On the flip side, I watched a founder with minimally designed slides that were effectively aligned with his confident delivery.
This tells you a simple truth.
Busy slides indicate a lack of confidence that causes the founder to pile up too much information in case he/she forgets.
The golden rule is to realize your audience is consuming information from two channels: Your verbal delivery and your slides.
Actually three.
The third channel is distraction from their phones or the people around them.
What is unique about this channel is that it also serves as an “engagement meter.”
If you see people tinkering with their phones, it’s a low signal, vs. a high one when people fully focus on the presenter and their facial expressions mirror the pitch of the emotional story arc.
In short, your slides should just function as brief springboards for your verbal key points, where you can expand further.
This allows the audience to have a nice balance of glancing at your slide and capturing the key message from your verbal delivery.
Props
Another startup founder, during his practice pitch, always referred to two toy-like objects when talking about his two products for the ERP sector.
I failed to see the connection and, throughout the entire talk, struggled to understand how they actually work, as I didn’t see any USB connectors or anything.
It ended up being just symbolic objects that did nothing but confuse.
In the same vein, a founder of an AI voice agent solution for CRM systems didn’t demo an audio recording of his AI agent in action, leaving the audience to wonder why people should even bother to chat with a bot.
How is it even possible?
On the flip side, a founder of a water-resistant drone integrated the product several times throughout his talk, and this helped bring it to life much faster.
Delivery
Lastly, you can have the best slides, props, business model, and amazing traction with paying customers, rosy ARR - but if your delivery is poor, it won’t fly.
In this department, I saw founders who were so nervous they stopped every couple of seconds to look at their notes on their phones.
In contrast, I saw others with confident, fluid delivery that was also reflected in their body language.
Here, the trick is to rehearse to the point where you can deliver your pitch like an actor who blindly knows her lines.
You can then focus on your body language, pacing, tone of voice, facial expressions, and hand movements.
Yes! Delivering a pitch is no different than an acting audition, where you need to emotionally move your audience’s hearts and minds into action.
Beyond visual storytelling
Lastly, a comment one panelist shared at a talk I attended, I think, is essential for founders to keep in mind:
“Make sure you find a problem that needs a solution and not a solution that seeks a problem.”
Oftentimes, you see nice-to-have solutions, not a must-have.
This is a clear signal that the founder first developed the product based on meager market validation, or even not at all, and is now shopping for a problem to solve.
The harsh reality hits hard.
With over 90% of startups failing, the #1 reason for failure is:
No market need.
You realize the importance of starting your venture journey by first identifying and validating a real burning problem and then becoming a domain expert with your solution in fixing that pain.
Starting your journey with solid customer research is a must.
In storytelling language, vetting the conflict part of your story makes your resolution much more impactful.
What do you think? What’s been your experience delivering a pitch? Feel free to drop your comments below.
See you next time!
Best,
- Shlomi
Shlomi Ron
Founder, Visual Storytelling Institute
shlomi@visualstorytell.com | Follow me on Notes
story > visual > emotion > experience
