Delivering the pitch: live, Q&A and demo

The formats you will meet

Prepare for the specific setting. These three pitch formats give investors different amounts of time and ask them to make different decisions.

• The timed competition pitch. At Nordic angel events the working shape is three minutes to pitch, three minutes of questions and two minutes in which the audience scores or votes, run in a block of seven or eight companies. The room is deciding whether you are worth a meeting, by comparison with the company before you and the one after. The pitch gets you noticed; the questions get you the meeting.
• The first meeting. Thirty minutes, with one investor or a small group, in a room or on a call. Expect to present for ten of them and answer for twenty. The investor is deciding whether to spend real hours on you: a second meeting, reference calls, a look at the numbers.
• The deep dive. An hour or more with an investor who has decided to do the work, usually with the numbers open and a co-investor listening. This is due diligence (selskapsgjennomgang) in conversation, and the questions are the ones the written process will put to you again later.

In all three, what is being judged is mostly you. Investors’ own team questions include how well the founders explain the business, whether they are realistic about their weaknesses and obstacles, whether their dynamic would survive the pressure of running and growing a company, and what the investor’s instinct says about them.

Investors assess these qualities by watching you present and, especially, respond to questions. A document alone cannot show them.

Our pitch preparation service works on the deck and the delivery together for that reason.

Compressing to the short format

Three minutes is roughly ten slides at eighteen seconds each, and most first attempts lose the opening minute to a story. What survives compression is the problem and who has it, the proof that someone pays to have it solved, and the ask. Everything else is held for the questions.

Cut in this order, and stop cutting when the timing holds.

1. The origin story and the vision slide. The room wants the company as it is.
2. Detail on the product. One sentence on what it does, one on who uses it.
3. The full market build. State the segment and the number of buyers; the arithmetic waits for the deep dive.
4. The competition matrix. Name the alternative the buyer uses today, and why they would switch.
5. Advisers, logos and awards.

Keep the details an investor needs to assess the opportunity:

• The customer, named where you can name them.
• A figure showing money changing hands.
• One relevant fact about each founder.
• The amount you are raising, the milestone it funds and who could fund the next round.

The presented deck and the send-ahead deck are two files. The send-ahead pitch deck reads alone and carries its evidence. The presented one is a set of large, sparse slides that support what you say, with the evidence slides held in reserve for the questions. A room shown the send-ahead deck reads it while you talk and stops listening.

A first-time pitcher should time the run-through with a stopwatch and cut until it lands at two minutes forty-five without hurrying. Cut material until you can finish at a steady pace; rushing makes you sound nervous.

The demo: when it belongs in the pitch

A demo proves that the product exists and works when you run it. It proves nothing about whether anyone buys it, and the buyer is what the room is weighing. Steve Blank, writing about US accelerators in 2013, put it directly:

Flashy demo days are great theater, but it’s not clear there’s a correlation between giving a great PowerPoint presentation and a two minute demo and building a successful business model.

So a demo takes time in a short pitch only when it shows what the words cannot: a product whose value is visible in ten seconds of use, or a physical device the room would otherwise doubt exists. A software product with a familiar interface gets a sentence and a screenshot, and the time goes to the customer evidence.

Prepare for problems with both the venue and the product. These practical steps help you recover quickly if the demo fails.

• Assume the live demo will fail. Venue networks drop, projectors reject laptops, a login expires. Before the day, record the demo as a short video stored on the laptop and on a phone, and carry screenshots of the three screens that matter.
• Rehearse the fallback as carefully as the demo. When the live version dies, switch to the video within five seconds and narrate it as if nothing happened. A quick recovery keeps attention on the product; a minute spent reconnecting interrupts the pitch.
• Script the narration. Say what the user is doing and why it matters to them; the screen shows the how. A demo narrated as a feature tour loses the room by the second click.
• Time-box it. Thirty seconds in a three-minute pitch, two minutes in a first meeting. Then back to the customer.
• For a demo-heavy product, lead with the outcome. Show the result the user gets, then the one interaction that produces it. The full walkthrough belongs in the deep dive, with the investor at the keyboard.

The Q&A is the real pitch

Customer questions test whether your plans reflect buyers’ actual needs and behaviour. The nineteen examples below are a preparation checklist, not a prediction of every first meeting. Also prepare for questions about technology, the team, finances and legal or commercial risks.

Answering well requires direct knowledge of the buyer. Rehearse all nineteen questions before the pitch.

Who the buyer is, and how they decide

1. Who are your customers? In detail, who is the person, and who are the main ones?
2. What do you look at in an audience to decide which customers are worth focusing on: decision-making timeframe, budget, expertise in your area, loyalty, or whatever else matters to you?
3. What is your customers’ awareness stage? Do they even know that what you sell exists?
4. Where on the decision-making curve is your client?
5. How do your customers make decisions, and what hidden motivations, pains and goals sit behind the decision?
6. What are your customers’ personality traits and characteristics?

The buying process and its friction

1. Are your customers experts in what you offer, or do they feel like idiots when trying to buy?
2. How confident are your customers about choosing, needing and implementing your type of product or service?
3. Do you do a consultative sale?
4. Do your customers depend on you when choosing this type of product or service? Is there an implementation, integration or onboarding process on the customer’s side that you need to be part of, or could be?
5. Do you need to help an influencing manager inside the customer’s company to sell your solution internally?
6. How do you become the easiest choice for your customers to make?

What the product does to the customer

1. Does your solution make your customers stronger?
2. Does your solution help your customers become innovators, or braver players in their market?
3. Does your solution excite your customers, or make them see more fear and risk?
4. What do your customers need to learn from you, and how do they become better by working with you?

Positioning and value

1. How do you describe and position your product or service?
2. Why did your existing customers choose you? What value did you bring, and what strong traits did they see in you?
3. What is the value you bring to society and to your customers?

A strong answer to any of them has the same shape: a specific buyer, a dated conversation, and a number where there is one. Check your prepared answers against these criteria before rehearsing.

The last group carries the question angels weigh most. “Why did your existing customers choose you” has a checkable answer, because the customers can be called, and an answer that names the alternative they left is the strongest evidence a first pitch can offer.

Beyond the customer, expect one question about the round: who funds the next one, and why the milestones this money reaches would make them want to. Answer it with the milestone and the kind of investor it attracts. “We will raise more later” is heard as a plan that ends at the money.

The question you cannot answer

Every pitch brings a question you cannot answer. Investors notice how you handle it, whether in a competition or a deep dive.

• The question you know. Answer it in two sentences, with the number, and stop. Founders lose rooms by answering a known question for ninety seconds.
• The question you half-know. Give what you know, mark the boundary, and say what would settle it. “Churn is four per cent a month on eleven paying accounts. On a base that small I would not build on it yet, and by the second meeting I will have the cohort data.” A boundary stated is read as precision.
• The question you cannot answer. Say so, say how you will find out, and say when. “I don’t know. I will have that from our two largest customers by Friday and I will send it in writing.” Then send it, by Friday, in writing.

Investors ask themselves whether a team understands and is realistic about its weaknesses and obstacles, and pitch judges score a realistic assessment of weaknesses and obstacles as one criterion among a handful.

Volunteer the two risks most likely to end the company. Concealing a known problem undermines confidence in the answers you have already given.

Bluffing is the one thing that ends a process in the room. An investor who hears a confident answer and later finds it wrong has learned something about every future answer, and most will stop there without saying why.

During the meeting, record every open question, who asked it and when you promised an answer. Send complete answers in one message by that date, with the deck and one-pager. Keeping this commitment gives investors evidence they can use in due diligence.

Closing the room

Finish by making the next step explicit. Cover these four points.

1. Restate the ask in one sentence: the amount, the instrument, and what it reaches.
2. Say what is committed already, and say it honestly. A named anchor changes the room. An “interested” investor described as committed changes it the other way once checked, and it will be checked.
3. Ask for the next step, concretely. In a competition, a meeting; in a first meeting, a second one with the numbers open; in a deep dive, the diligence timetable.
4. Agree who follows up, with what, and by when. Then be first.

A useful outcome of a first pitch is an agreed next conversation. If an investor offers a commitment, clarify its terms and any conditions. Do not confuse enthusiasm in a meeting with an unconditional investment commitment.

What follows a good pitch is a short run of meetings, some with you and some among the investors themselves, and then the written questions of due diligence.

Be ready to send the deck, one-pager and written answers to open questions. Use material suitable for forwarding at the introductory stage. If you need to share sensitive information, agree confidentiality before disclosing it, even if that is before the data room. Sharing documents does not itself create an NDA.

Rehearsal that works

Use rehearsal to practise difficult answers before investors hear them. Adapt the preparation to your situation.

• First pitch. Run the timed version aloud, with a stopwatch, at least ten times, and cut until it lands inside the time with a margin. Then have two people who do not know the company each pick five of the nineteen questions and ask them cold. Record the answers and listen for the ones that ran long.
• Demo-heavy product. Rehearse the failure. Pull the network in the third run-through and switch to the video without a pause. If the switch is not automatic by the fifth run, the demo does not go in the short pitch.
• Second raise. Open the rehearsal with the milestones the last deck promised and what happened to each, because an investor who saw the last deck asks that first. Practise saying which ones you missed, and why.
• Pitching with a co-founder. Decide who answers which questions before the room, and rehearse the handover. Two founders who interrupt each other answer the team-dynamic question for the investor, and answer it badly.
• Every pitch. Run one hostile round, in which the questioners are told to find the weakest claim and press on it. The claim they find is the one to fix in the deck, or to name yourself before it is asked.

The last check is the deck itself. If the timing only holds when you hurry, the deck is too long, and the cut goes back to what survives compression.