Knit picks: Apr 30

2021/04/30

Hey Knit natterers! Software doesn’t sell itself. Let’s talk about

Pitch stuff

I revived and reworked an old pitch deck. I haaate working on decks, but this is the first time I thought it was more than just reiterating words in bullets. A few of you have seen the original deck and thanks for the helpful feedback!

The deck is mostly visual aids for talking points (I wrote some in the speaker notes), but feel free to take a look! I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

Working on pitches is hard! This is basically the fourth rewrite of the deck. And let’s be honest it’s rough. But I think sharing the work in progress is interesting. Pitch decks are their own iterative creative product. Some successful founders iterate over 30 versions.

Public speaking has never been my forte, so I was pretty interested watching a video lecture How to Speak by Patrick Winston. Lots of overlap with pitching. The whole thing is interesting but some of my key takeaways. Start with an “empowerment promise” (after this you will …). Situate the listener in the current problem or goal before describing the solution. To make an idea stick, give it a symbol, a slogan, something surprising, something salient, and tell a story.