黎卓生
How to pitch your startup in 3 simple steps
December 12, 2023
If you are working on your pitch, it might feel like you are constantly changing it without much progress. Every time you look into somebody else's product, every time an investor gives you feedback, every confused look you get stresses you out.
The three why's framework is a simple way to pitch anything. Why now, why anything, why you.
- Why now gives away why the problem is urgent.
- Why anything establishes the problem's importance.
- Why you puts your solution in its best, most differentiated light.
The three why's framework gives you a powerful way to structure your pitch. It's flexible: you can use it to make a simple one liner, all the way up to a multi-slide deck. It could be a general pitch, or it could be very much tailored towards your audience or customer. Let's go through these topics one-by-one.
Example
Let's start with a simple example.
You need lunch in time for your meeting at 1pm. Get a bacon sandwich.
You might have just heard this from your friend today, or you might have seen it on a billboard somewhere. It's familiar, and its a great pitch.
It starts with the "why now" – you have a meeting shortly. If you don't eat now, you might not be able to eat for another 1 to 2 hours. It then talks about the "why anything": you are hungry. You need lunch. It's not an optional thing – everybody gets hungry and needs lunch. It then closes with a "why you" (or in this case, why this particular sandwich vendor): it has bacon, your favourite sandwich filling.
So that's three why's in a simple example.
Let's break it down further so that we can use it to pitch more complex ideas, for example a feature, a product, or a startup.
Why now
First things first: tell the other person why, if they don't stop and listen, it would be too late.
Why now gives away why the problem is urgent.
What you are really doing is handling a common objection to any pitch, "I don't have time right now". There are a few common ways how people come up with a great why now for their offering:
- Competitor movement. Somebody else launching a new feature, entering another market, raising a funding round always ups the ante. "Everybody is launching generative AI features. You are late to the party.".
- Industry, regulation, and technology changes. In marketing technology, 3rd party cookies disappearing is a great example. Another example: Google and Yahoo announcing stricter spam policies, creating urgency to change before the new policy comes into place. "Banks are required to report on carbon footprint by December. Are you on track to meeting this requirement?".
- The cost of doing nothing. "The typical project management team wastes 30 hours a week on data entry. We can automate this." Unfortunately, this disqualifies everybody who doesn't think they waste 30 hours a week, and invites pointless debates at times on whether the cost is 10, 20, or 30 hours. Furthermore, if the prospect manages a large team of people, 30 hours of wastage might not be too urgent for them.
In my experience, prospects respond emotionally to urgency driven by complicated factors, like competitor movement and regulatory changes. Simple, metrics driven factors like the "cost of doing nothing" appeal more to the rational.
Preferably, you can leverage both types of why now. If I had to pick, emotionally charged factors are always easier to pitch.
Why anything
When you've established why the problem is urgent, it's time to make it sound big and hairy too. If you don't do this, your audience will be tempted to just 'let it pass'.
Why anything establishes the problem's importance.
Instead of pitching the solution ("Are you using AI?"), the 2nd why forces you to pitch why the problem is worth solving. ("What happens when a competitor launches an AI-first version of your product?")
This kills two birds with one stone: it helps you frame the importance of your pitch, and defends you against the other person brushing you off and doing nothing.
For example, say you are pitching Datadog. You're "why anything" maybe "your logging is broken, and your engineers are frustrated". Great. You are now getting the customer to feel their pain.
But let's dig deeper. While you can't inflate the functionality of your offering, you can tie it to a bigger problem. What happens if your logging is broken? Well, chances are, you won't know if your e-commerce website goes down, and even if you do, it will take you days to solve it. So, what is the real cost of the e-commerce website being down for a day? Maybe that's $5M in sales.
Suddenly, by answering "Why anything?", you've moved the narrative from "your engineers will love this logging tool" to "do you want to make $5M back in lost sales?".
Now that's important.
Why you
You shared why your pitch is urgent and important, now you close with why you have the best solution.
Why you puts your solution in its best, most differentiated light.
If you are working on a one-liner, or an elevator pitch, you won't have much intel on your audience. To cast your solution in its best light, for the "Why now" and "Why anything" you led with, you should highlight why your offering is the best in the market.
If somebody really does their research on the market, your pitch should ensure that nothing solves this big, urgent problem better than you do, for reasons you highlight in your "why you" answer.
Benefit: a problem-focused pitch
Three why's forces you to focus on the problem that your customer might have. This gets you in front of 99% of pitches, where they are focused on what they are selling. Don't even get me started on pitches that include their company history.
So that's it! In the next post, I am going to draw out how we use this method to make elevator pitches, marketing websites, and sales decks.