A pitch is a story with stakes. It needs a protagonist (the customer), a problem (their unmet need), and a resolution (your product or idea). Everything else is supporting evidence.
Structure matters more than slides
I’ve worked on pitches for startups raising angel rounds, for artists presenting to the United Nations, and for brands presenting at Nokia Bell Labs. The contexts are wildly different. The structure is remarkably similar.
Every effective pitch I’ve built follows the same arc: establish the world as it is, reveal the tension, present the shift.
Common mistakes
The most common pitch mistake is leading with the solution. Investors, partners, and audiences need to feel the problem before they can appreciate the answer.
The second most common mistake is over-explaining. If your pitch needs twenty slides, your thinking isn’t clear enough. Clarity is compression.
The role of the strategist
My role in pitch development isn’t to write the deck. It’s to find the story. Sometimes the founder knows the story but can’t see it because they’re too close. Sometimes the story hasn’t been found yet and needs to be uncovered through research and conversation.
Either way, the strategist’s job is to make the implicit explicit, and to structure it so that it lands.