Pitching

Priya's disastrous first pitch

Priya's first investor meeting was in a glass-walled conference room in Gurgaon. The investor — a partner at a seed fund — sat across from her with his laptop open, sipping black coffee.

Priya had prepared 20 slides. She'd been up until 2 AM the night before, adding one more chart, one more bullet point. She opened her laptop, connected to the projector, and started reading from her notes.

Slide 1: Company introduction. Slide 2: The team. Slide 3: Mission statement. Slide 4: Vision statement. Slide 5: The agriculture sector in India — a 15-minute overview with six sub-charts.

By slide 7, the investor interrupted. "Can you tell me what the product actually does?"

Priya fumbled. She jumped to slide 14, which had a screenshot of the app. But she'd built up no context. No story. No hook.

"How many farmers are using this?" he asked.

She flipped back to slide 11. Then forward to slide 16. The numbers were scattered across the deck with no logic.

"What's your revenue model?"

Priya froze for a second. She knew the answer. She'd thought about it for months. But in that moment, with that screen, in that room, under that pressure — her mind went blank.

The meeting ended in 18 minutes. The investor was polite. He said he'd "circle back." He never did.

On the bus back to Haldwani — six hours — Priya replayed every moment. She knew the problem wasn't her business. The business was solid. The problem was the pitch.

Every founder has a bad first pitch. The good ones learn from it.

What is a pitch?

A pitch is a structured, compelling presentation of your business to someone who might give you money, advice, or partnership.

It sounds simple. It's not. You're taking something you've spent months or years building — something complex, nuanced, deeply personal — and compressing it into 10-15 minutes that must convince a stranger to bet money on you.

A good pitch does three things:

  1. Makes the problem feel urgent and real — the listener must care
  2. Makes the solution feel obvious and powerful — "of course, why doesn't this exist already?"
  3. Makes you feel like the person who can pull it off — trust, competence, grit

If you achieve all three, you'll get a second meeting.

The pitch deck: 10-12 slides

Your pitch deck is the visual backbone of your presentation. Here's the structure that works:

Slide 1: Title

Your company name, one-line description, your name. That's it.

PahadiDirect — Connecting hill farmers directly to urban buyers.

Slide 2: The Problem

What's broken? Who's suffering? Make it specific and emotional.

A farmer in Ranikhet grows the best apples in India. He gets ₹40/kg. You pay ₹200/kg in Delhi. The 4 middlemen between them capture 80% of the value.

Don't use abstract statistics. Tell a story. Name a person. Make it real.

Slide 3: The Solution

What do you do, and how does it fix the problem? Keep it simple.

PahadiDirect is a mobile app that lets farmers list their produce and sell directly to buyers in Delhi, Chandigarh, and Dehradun. No middlemen. Farmers get 60-80% more. Buyers get fresher produce at 20% less.

Slide 4: How It Works

Show the product. Screenshots, a demo, a simple diagram. Investors want to see it.

Slide 5: Market Size

How big is the opportunity? Use the TAM-SAM-SOM framework from earlier chapters.

India's fruits & vegetables market: ₹6 lakh crore (TAM). Uttarakhand + Himachal production: ₹12,000 crore (SAM). Direct-to-consumer produce from hill regions: ₹800 crore (SOM).

Slide 6: Business Model

How do you make money? Be specific.

We charge a 12% commission on every transaction. Average order value: ₹2,400. Revenue per order: ₹288. Current monthly revenue: ₹1.4 lakh.

Slide 7: Traction

What have you achieved so far? Numbers, charts, growth curves.

340 farmers, 1,200 buyers, ₹12 lakh monthly GMV, 22% month-over-month growth, 68% buyer repeat rate.

This is often the most important slide. It separates "I have an idea" from "I have a business."

Slide 8: Team

Who's building this? What makes you qualified?

Investors invest in people. Show that your team has the skills, experience, and grit to execute.

Priya: Ex-software engineer at a Bangalore startup, grew up in Haldwani, family farms in Almora district. Knows the problem firsthand.

Slide 9: Competition

Who else is doing something similar? How are you different?

Don't say "we have no competition." Investors don't believe that, and it suggests you haven't done your research. Show you know the landscape and explain your unique advantage.

Slide 10: Go-to-Market

How will you get customers? What's your distribution strategy?

Phase 1: District-by-district farmer onboarding through local agriculture extension officers. Phase 2: Buyer acquisition through social media and partnerships with organic food communities in Delhi NCR.

Slide 11: Financials

Revenue projections for 2-3 years. Key assumptions. Path to profitability.

Keep it honest. Investors have seen a thousand hockey-stick projections. They care more about your assumptions than your predictions.

Slide 12: The Ask

How much are you raising? What will you do with it? What milestones will you hit?

Raising ₹75 lakh. Allocation: Tech (40%), Hiring (30%), Operations (20%), Buffer (10%). Milestones: 2,000 farmers, ₹50 lakh monthly GMV, 6 districts by month 18.

Storytelling in pitches

The most common mistake in pitching is starting with yourself. "Hi, I'm Priya, I have a B.Tech from..."

Nobody cares. Not yet. They'll care about you after they care about the problem.

Start with the problem. Make it a story.

"Rawat ji grows some of the finest apples in India. His orchard is at 6,500 feet in the Kumaon hills. Perfect altitude, perfect soil, perfect climate.

Last season, he harvested 800 kg of premium apples. A middleman came to his village, offered ₹40 per kg, and took the entire lot. Those apples ended up in Delhi's INA Market, selling for ₹200 per kg.

Rawat ji made ₹32,000. The middlemen made ₹1,28,000. For doing what? Transporting and reselling.

This happens to 12 million hill farmers across India. We're fixing it."

Now the investor is paying attention. Now you can talk about your app, your technology, your team.

The structure of a good story:

  1. A character with a problem (Rawat ji)
  2. The stakes — what's at risk (farmer livelihoods)
  3. The turning point — your solution enters
  4. The transformation — what changes because of you

Every great pitch is a story. The problem is the conflict. Your startup is the resolution.

Priya's improved pitch

After her disastrous first meeting, Priya spent two weeks rebuilding her pitch. She got feedback from three other founders. She practiced in front of Pushpa didi (who understood nothing about tech but told her, "Beta, you're talking too fast and you sound scared — slow down").

Her new opening:

"A farmer in Ranikhet grows the best apples in India. He gets ₹40 per kg. You pay ₹200 per kg. We're fixing that.

PahadiDirect connects 340 hill farmers directly to 1,200 urban buyers. No middlemen. Farmers earn 60% more. Buyers pay 20% less. We've done ₹72 lakh in transactions in eight months, growing 22% month-over-month.

I'm Priya. I built this from Haldwani, not from a co-working space in Bangalore. I grew up here. I know these farmers. And I need ₹75 lakh to take this from 3 districts to all of Uttarakhand."

That's 30 seconds. And it covers: problem, solution, traction, differentiation, and the ask. The investor is hooked. Now the remaining 14 minutes are a conversation, not a lecture.

The elevator pitch (30 seconds)

Not every pitch happens in a conference room. Sometimes you have 30 seconds — at a networking event, in a hallway, in an actual elevator.

Your elevator pitch should cover:

  1. What you do (one sentence)
  2. Why it matters (one sentence)
  3. Traction (one sentence)

Formula: We do [X] for [Y] because [Z]. We've achieved [traction].

Priya's: "We connect Uttarakhand's hill farmers directly to urban buyers through a mobile app, cutting out middlemen so farmers earn more and buyers pay less. We've done ₹72 lakh in GMV across 3 districts in 8 months."

Practice this until it's effortless. You should be able to say it while ordering chai.

Demo day pitches vs investor meetings

These are very different formats. Don't prepare the same way for both.

Demo day (3-5 minutes, on stage)

  • 50-200 people in the audience
  • You're one of 10-15 startups presenting
  • Very limited time — every second counts
  • Focus on the story and the big numbers
  • Goal: get people interested enough to approach you afterward
  • No time for Q&A during the pitch
  • Energy and stage presence matter a lot

Investor meeting (30-60 minutes, one-on-one)

  • 1-3 people in the room
  • It's a conversation, not a performance
  • You'll present for 10-15 minutes, then 15-30 minutes of Q&A
  • Investors will interrupt — that's a good sign (means they're engaged)
  • Go deeper on metrics, market, and strategy
  • It's okay to say "I don't know, but here's how I'd find out"
  • Be yourself — investors are evaluating you as a person, not just a slide deck

Handling Q&A

The Q&A portion of a pitch often matters more than the presentation itself. Here are the most common investor questions and how to answer them:

"Why are you the right person to solve this?" Talk about your unique insight, experience, and connection to the problem. For Priya: she grew up in the hills, she knows the farmers, she has the tech skills.

"What if [Big Company] does this?" Don't panic. Acknowledge the risk, then explain your advantage — speed, focus, on-the-ground knowledge. "Flipkart could do this, but they won't send someone to sit in a village in Almora and onboard farmers one by one."

"How do you acquire customers?" Be specific about channels. Don't just say "digital marketing." Explain the actual playbook.

"What's your burn rate?" Know this number exactly. It's how much you spend per month. If you don't know it, the meeting is effectively over.

"What happens if you don't raise this round?" Be honest. "We have 4 months of runway. We'll cut costs and focus on revenue. We won't die, but we'll grow much slower."

"What's your biggest risk?" Name it. Don't dodge. Investors respect founders who understand their risks. "Our biggest risk is farmer retention. If we can't keep farmers on the platform through seasons, the supply side collapses."

Three rules for Q&A:

  1. Answer the question that was asked. Don't pivot to a different topic.
  2. It's okay to say "I don't know." Follow it with "but here's what I think" or "I'll find out and get back to you."
  3. Keep answers under 60 seconds. Long, rambling answers lose the room.

What investors really evaluate

Here's a secret: investors are not evaluating your slides. They're evaluating you through the lens of your slides.

The real scorecard:

  1. Team (50%) — Can these people execute? Are they smart, resilient, and honest? Do they work well together? Do they know their domain?

  2. Market (30%) — Is this market big enough to support a venture-scale outcome? Is it growing? Is the timing right?

  3. Product (20%) — Does the product work? Do people want it? Is there something defensible about it?

Notice: product is only 20%. That surprises many founders. But investors know that good teams can fix a mediocre product. Good products with bad teams usually fail.

An investor once told Priya: "I've backed founders who completely changed their product three times. They succeeded because they were relentless. I've also backed perfect products built by teams that fell apart. Those failed."

Follow-up after the pitch

The pitch doesn't end when you leave the room. What you do in the next 48 hours matters.

  1. Send a thank-you email within 24 hours. Short, professional, warm.
  2. Attach the deck (PDF, not a link that might break).
  3. Include any data you promised during Q&A ("I said I'd send you our retention numbers — here they are").
  4. One line summarizing next steps: "Would love to set up a follow-up call next week to go deeper on unit economics."
  5. Don't pester. If they don't respond in a week, send one gentle follow-up. After two follow-ups with no response, move on.

Track everything. Use a simple spreadsheet:

  • Investor name, fund, date of meeting, status, follow-up date, notes

Fundraising is a pipeline, just like sales. Manage it the same way.

Practice, practice, practice

The difference between a good pitch and a bad pitch is almost never the content. It's the delivery.

How to practice:

  • Mirror practice. Stand up, present to yourself. Watch your body language. Are you reading from a script? Stop.
  • Record yourself. Painful to watch, but incredibly useful. You'll notice things — filler words, rushing, monotone voice — that you can't hear in real-time.
  • Practice with friends. Find 2-3 people (ideally founders) and pitch to them. Get honest feedback.
  • Practice with non-founders. Can your mother understand your pitch? If Pushpa didi can follow the first two minutes, you're on the right track.
  • Practice the Q&A. Have someone fire tough questions at you. The more you practice handling curveballs, the calmer you'll be in real meetings.
  • Practice with a timer. If your pitch is supposed to be 10 minutes, practice until it's exactly 10 minutes — not 15, not 7.

Priya practiced her pitch 23 times before her next investor meeting. She pitched to Pushpa didi, to her parents (who were confused but supportive), to two founder friends on video call, and to her reflection in the bathroom mirror at 11 PM.

Her second investor meeting lasted 45 minutes. The investor asked 14 questions. Priya answered all of them. At the end, he said, "Send me your data room. I want to look deeper."

That investor became her lead angel.

Key takeaways

  1. Your first pitch will probably be bad. That's normal. Learn and improve.
  2. 10-12 slides. Problem, Solution, How It Works, Market, Business Model, Traction, Team, Competition, Go-to-Market, Financials, The Ask.
  3. Start with the story, not with yourself. Make the investor feel the problem before you present the solution.
  4. The elevator pitch (30 seconds) is your most important tool. Know it cold.
  5. Q&A matters more than the presentation. Prepare for tough questions.
  6. Investors bet on teams, then markets, then products. In that order.
  7. Follow up within 24 hours. Be professional, be warm, be concise.
  8. Practice until it feels natural. Then practice some more.

Priya has her funding. She has her pitch down cold. Now comes the next challenge — her app works in 3 districts. How does she take it to all of Uttarakhand? Then Himachal? Then all of India? That's scaling, and it's where most startups break.