How to Pitch Your Startup Idea to Investors Successfully

Many outcomes important to startups are gated by pitching: the ability to quickly tell someone about your company and make them intrigued enough to want to learn more. You pitch your company every day to everyone—potential employees, investors, and prospects.

This is not a natural skill for many founders. Protalent has helped a few thousand companies get started and assisted dozens with refining their pitches. We distilled these lessons to help the community, and they focus on pitching investors, from the perspective of an early-stage company.

Know your audience

Put yourself in the shoes of the person receiving your pitch. They’re well educated, savvy about startups, and sharp about business. They want to like you—this is a job for optimists.

They won’t know this field as well as you do. They have not breathed the problem space like you have. The jargon and industry assumptions may be new to them.

Explain assumptions in your pitch like you would to a smart friend in a different field. Be explicit about connecting dots.

They’re also highly likely to be overwhelmed.

Yours will not be the first pitch they’ll see today, or the last. Reviewers at top accelerators and early-stage VC firms see hundreds of pitches every day, generally only for about two minutes each. Your objective is to pack as much positive signal into those two minutes as possible and ensure the reviewer retains one core idea to communicate to someone who asks about you.

The review process continues for days on end. It is exhausting. Far too many pitches retread the same tired ground.

Help your reviewer quickly understand (and remember) what parts about your company are exceptional.

The investor is not your user, so pitching users and pitching investors are completely different. The investor will almost always be less knowledgeable in every way about the problem, industry, solution, and jargon.