Crafting a Great Pitch

There are three key elements to crafting a great pitch - effectively describing the Problem, Solution and Market Size. Ideally you should be able to communicate all three elements in a few sentences.

State the Problem

The first and most important part of a great pitch is to identify a painful problem.

The more severe the problem you are solving, the more valuable your solution will be. When you're explaining your problem, discuss how frustrating this problem is for customers today.

For example, if you were pitching the idea for Facebook at inception, you may have started with something along the lines of "The average person has 150 friends who are nearly impossible to stay in touch with at all times."

The problem should be something people can easily relate to, and more importantly, want to help you solve.

Introduce the Solution

Once people can identify the problem, then you can present a solution that addresses the problem beautifully. Your solution should be clear and concise, focusing on the most important part of the problem, not every last feature.

In our Facebook example, we might say "The average person has 150 friends who are nearly impossible to stay in touch with at all times. Facebook creates a social network that generates a single feed of information about the status of every person you know."

Does Facebook do 50 other things? Sure. But all you care about in your pitch is the heart of the problem and the most important part of the solution.

Define the Market Size

Once you've convinced people that you're solving a painful problem, the last step is to put the size of the problem in perspective. This is also known as your Market Size.

This part of your pitch is often more important to equity investors than it is people that will simply back your project for rewards. Investors want to know that your company is serving a big enough market to grow in. The bigger the market, the bigger the potential value of the company in the future, and therefore the bigger the payback on their investment.

If we were to explain the market size using the example of Facebook above, we might just tie it to the Problem Statement. For example, "Over 300 billion people worldwide have an average of 150 friends who are nearly impossible to stay in touch with at all times."

With that small addition we can quickly give prospective investors a good sense for how big this problem is.

Put it all together

Now that you have each of the components for your perfect pitch, it’s time to pull them all together. Your pitch should be concise and just a few sentences long.

Our example pitch would read like this:

"Over 300 billion people worldwide have an average of 150 friends who are nearly impossible to stay in touch with at all times. Facebook creates a social network that generates a single feed of information about the status of every person you know."

The rest of your company profile may explain all the details of your idea, but should always lead and center around a strong, well-articulated pitch that anyone can immediately grasp and get excited about.