Jason Calacanis

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## 5 Rules for Pitching

1. Show, Don't Tell
2. Get to the Product in 15 Seconds
3. Examples Matter!
4. Synchronicity: what you say matches what's on the slide
5. One Point Per Slide

## Pitch Content

1. **Intro:** Your name, company, logo, tagline. "I'm so and so, founder of x, and we [ insert your one-sentence tag line ] "
2. **Problem**: If necessary, you can spend one sentence setting up the problem. Otherwise, get right to the product demo. "Let me show you how it works."
3. **Product demo:** Show the product through the example of an actual customer. If it's a two-sided product/marketplace, show the relationship. Use your most compelling customer example and use specifics, not generics. So don't use generic language. Name your customer. Consider using your top customer– if you don’t have one yet, then use an Ideal Profile Customer (IPC) example.
4. **Business model:** Here's how we make (or will make) money.
5. **Traction:** Growth, revenue. Bar charts are best for this. If you have two revenue streams you can use a stacked bar chart with different colors representing the different streams. Monthly is best but in certain cases such as seasonal products, it’s okay to use quarterly.
6. **Customers:** Highlight your strengths– ****Number of customers. Logos of important clients. Growth rate of customers. Retention. Customer testimonials. Just pick one or two of the best, and give them separate slides.
7. **Competition:** Columns with the check marks are usually the best model for this. Create a chart where you have all of the checkmarks and your competitors don't.
8. **Go-to Market:** Show how you are acquiring customers.
9. **Roadmap:** How you'll scale, first to $10M, then to $100M. Use a timeline, with years on the bottom, showing the revenue you'll hit with each year and mention how you'll get there. 
This is another way of getting at market size, but it's a bottoms-up approach.
Does not have to be very detailed, just hit the major milestones.
10. **Team.** Don't need a lot of text here. Just names, titles, and logos of where they worked previously (if relevant to their expertise).

## What investors are most interested in:

1. Product
2. Customers
3. Business Model, Margins, Unit Economics 
4. TAM (bottoms-up approach)
5. Go To Market (for early-stage companies that don’t have growth turned on yet)
6. Competitors
7. Vision/Roadmap
8. Team (when the team has a track record)

## Additional Tips:

- Avoid excessive use of **buzz words**, be specific
- Highlight your top customer and what impact your product/service had on their lives
- Put ONE Customer Testimonial and read it out. DON'T put several testimonials and not read any of them

## Pitch Format:

1. On the footer include: 
Name of company + logo; company URL; company Twitter or Instagram handle, page number
2. **One point per slide.** Keep it simple (i.e., don't combine business model + revenue in the same slide.) Multiple slides for multiple points.
3. The less text on screen, the better.
4. The demo should be a screencast / recording within your slide presentation. (Gifs and screenshots can also work.) Don't do a live demo, or use an embedded YouTube video, or use any video that has pre-recorded narration in it. You narrate it while doing the pitch.

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