Perfect Pitches Are Getting You Nowhere

Your Perfect Pitch Has Gotten You Nowhere

Founders, I am sure you can relate to what I am about to say. We’ve all spent time Googling the perfect pitch deck and have tried to mimic it the best we can. We practice the pitch over and over again to our team, to ourselves in the mirror, or while driving. The day of the pitch finally arrives and goes something like this:

1. You walk into the VC pitch.
2. You communicate the perfect market problem that needs solving — with a huge TAM.
3. You show off your perfect team.
4. You show there is little to no competition.
5. You show that you just need to “pour gas on the fire” to turn this into a unicorn.
6. You have executed your pitch perfectly — going slide by slide.
7. They tell you “we’ll be in touch.”
8. And finally, in about 1–2 weeks you receive the rejection email.

You hear of others getting funded on Linkedin and get stressed out as you ask yourself “what am I doing wrong?”

Perfect Pitches vs. Real Conversations

Over time, I broke out of perfect pitch mode and started shifting to real conversations with VCs about what was working for the business and what were my clear challenges. Though I had been pitching a “perfect” scenario for investors, the reality is that:

Yes, we had revenue and great customers, but no I didn’t have the perfect team.

Yes, we had great partnerships, but we also had tough competition we were up against.

Yes, we had product, but it was not even close to being ready to scale.

Shifting to this style of conversation with VCs really turned the fundraising tide in my favor. When I took on this “real conversations” approach, I saw the following start to happen in pitches:

1. VCs were MUCH more engaged
2. It felt more like a brainstorm session and the VC was helping me come up with solutions
3. I used my pitch deck as needed to solidify key points during the conversation
4. It led to more introductions to other VCs and my first term sheets

Conclusions

I think there was a time for perfect pitches, but tech has been on a bull run for a while now and it is starting to tighten. Today’s VCs don’t just want good ideas, but they want to know they can add value to the opportunity and trust leaders really understand what they are up against.

Yes the time for perfect pitches is over, make way for more real conversations.