Another great piece from Patrick, full of specific advice and grounded in several places with “and here’s the one non-obvious additional tidbit that will drive the point home for you most helpfully”.

Only minor addition I’d make is in the section on Fermi estimation of market size is to end that with a warning something like “but resist the temptation to say ‘and even if we only get 1% of that huge market, we’ll still be a success!’” You might be permanently viable and profitable (success for you perhaps), but getting 1% is harder than you think and is not a success case for a VC. But it’s super-tempting and common thought pattern. What you’re pitching and thinking of as an exciting modest success is another failure that the VC has to wind down and exit from.

You might be OK with that outcome, but portray that you’re single-mindedly going after 70+% of that market. If the investor wants to calculate what 1% of it is on their own, they can in their head; you don’t need to connect those dots for them and put the fallback/safety case in their mind. (It’s not entirely omitted, but I’d make it explicit as I’ve gone down this road myself.)

Won a pitch contest a while back with this cheeky presentation that aligns with the advice in the article: https://www.slideshare.net/guard0g/deeprem

This content makes for a compelling aside to Pitching Hacks book by Angel List: https://web.archive.org/web/20120227074613/https://ventureha...

See also: https://startupclass.samaltman.com/lists/readings/

1. You have to be something already

2. You have to have made a successful project already

3. If none of the above, try to demonstrate that you're really smart anyway

Give great advice : be succint

Half kidding, the post is by @patio11 btw.

Sensible advice, but my thought is that what everyone really needs is practice. What's the standard way to find a bunch of people willing to listen to a pitch?

Interesting that these were the four types of businesses called out:

1 - B2B SaaS sold on the low-touch model, like Basecamp

2 - B2B SaaS sold on a high-touch model, like Salesforce

3 - Mobile apps

4 - Ad-supported websites

What happened to B2C website where the C actually pays the B for a service?

That's really great content compared to the low quality blog posts of strangers that we are used to seeing here. The guy has an impressive track of records, and give no bullshit non-survivor bias insights.