Don’t Pitch — Tell a Story!

Image from Unsplash by Product School

Telling a story is an art. Pitching is a format — If you are pitching for funding, tell me what you do, what the money you want will cover, milestones you’ve reached in the past, if you need more, how are you going to stack it? If we give you this money, when do you expect to reach out to more operations to start paying it back? What impact will it have on your revenue? and so on.

That is the Format.

The story is more of an art because you have to reveal information. This is where art meets numbers. But you do need to know the pitch format so you can tell your story.

In my experience — having worked with up to 5,000 entrepreneurs every year for the last 20+ years — these presentations/pitches are hard to do especially if you have little time to do them!

The less time you have, the more you have to do. I know it sounds crazy, but usually for every 1 minute of pitching it takes 8 hours of practice and about 40 hours' worth of content.

That means if you have a 3-minute pitch, most likely you have to do about 120 hours of content creation, research, thoughts, reading, writing, discussion, and about 24 hours total of presenting, getting feedback, redoing it, rewriting it, and practicing again — just to do a 3–5 minute pitch that you can articulate in a meaningful way.