Top 3 Mistakes Founders Make When Pitching

When preparing to pitch for investment, founders often hear conflicting advice from investors and advisors: lead with the problem, but don’t focus on the negative. Highlight your team’s expertise, but don’t harp on it. Include the details of any patents you own, but don’t get too technical.

At times, it may feel impossible to perfect your pitch when everyone wants to see something different. Investors will continue to have personal preferences, but the following mistakes are some of the biggest and easiest to avoid:

• Incorrect Level & Amount of Information: The hierarchy of information on your slides becomes more important when you realize most investors are skimming, and never fully reading, your deck. You need to include enough information to get basic ideas across and to jog their memory when you’re not in front of them. Keep slides clean and major points large or bulleted. Lead with visuals; elaborate with text.
• Explaining How it Works vs. Value Delivered: Founders spend so much time developing the solution, it’s natural that, when asked to explain it, they default to describing the details of how the technology works. Investors almost never have the same technical or industry expertise as those developing the solutions. They care first and foremost that your solution is going to provide enough value to your target audience that the market will pay for the solution. Then, they care how it works. Lead with value, then explain the tech.
• Losing the Connection between MVP and Vision: Big visions produce big returns for investors, but when you lead with vision, investors may not be able to follow your thinking (or trust that you can get there). Investors want you to have clarity on the immediate problem and opportunity. They need to know you can build the right first thing for the right audience. However, they also want to know how you plan to scale that solution, whether to new audiences, into new verticals, or via new product lines, to produce a larger outcome for them. Lead with MVP, then explain your vision.

By avoiding these common mistakes, founders can ensure their pitch is clear, concise, and compelling to investors. Formatting for readability, focusing on the value of your solution, and showing you have a clear path to a venture outcome will increase the likelihood of securing capital from the right investors.

Meghan Corsello is a Senior Investment Associate at South Carolina Research Authority (SCRA) with a decade of experience helping early-stage companies find product-market fit. At SCRA, Meghan works with startups along the coast of South Carolina, coaching founders, making introductions to VCs and strategic partners, and providing them with access to non-dilutive and investment capital.