The Pitch and the Passion

The Pitch and the Passion

by Silvio Gulizia

To pitch is essentially the art of engaging people in our journey.

Two months ago, while mentoring a few startups at the Google Launchpad in Milan, I realized that lots of my pieces of advice would have been lost without the support of the founders passion. So I worked a lot to help them get this energy out of them. And I learned a lot of things too.

A pitch is a presentation startups use to tell their story to different people. Usually, investors. Aka, people they want to invest money in their business project. It could be used even to persuade talents to join the team, maybe accepting a relatively low salary or even paying them in shares.

Telling a Story

Every pitch is indeed a story. A story that shows where you started up and where are you going.

A story is a sequence of events happened to imaginary or real people told for entertainment. Every story follows a structure quite well defined.

Technically, a story is divided into two part: one that takes place in an ordered world, and another one in an unordered world.

All begins with a lively situation disrupted by an unexpected episode that triggers the action. Moved by this accident, a hero starts a journey that brings her to the unordered world. Here she needs to find people who can help her to face crisis and enemies that her own way is studded with.

After an internal and external evolution (sometimes even a revolution), the hero meets the last and biggest enemy or prove. Once it has been passed, she can go back to the ordered world, get a reward and celebrate the results.

In the pitch, the startup is the hero, the journey is the value proposition that will end up being true once the final obstacle will be removed. Allies are mentors, advisors, and investors. Crisis, when happened, are pivot and adjustments. A proof the startup can face and overcome obstacles.

Why Do You Need a Pitch for Your Dreams

If you are serious about your dreams, you need a pitch for each of them. This presentation will help you keep focusing on the story. It will even assist you in selling your story to others, so to get their support when needed, collect feedback and maybe to involve them too in your journey.

It will also instill in you the courage to go on and invest each day a little bit in your venture. It is fundamental to recall, day in and day out, the value you are generating, even if you can’t see it yet.

Repeat your pitch every morning in front of a mirror. Don’t lay to yourself: is this pitch as reliable as needed to persuade yourself in the mirror to put time, energy and money in it?

Without passion, you’re dead. Passion is what moves the hero to face perils and risk her life to remove the obstacles that prevent the world to be ordered as it was once upon a time.

How to Fully Commit Yourself to Passion

What the hell is this passion? I don’t believe it could be defined with words, so I took this quote from Ella Fitzgerald to help me explain what does it means: “Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there are love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.” Throughout the story of your pitch, you need to show love and inspiration for the adventures of your hero, like a hooligan at the stadium. As an ancient gladiator at the Colosseum, you have to fight for your life. Life is engagement; death is silence.

You could be wondering where this passion could come from. Simple answer: from inside your heart. More in deep, it emerges from the need you have to solve the problem you decided to take on. If you are working on something you don’t really mind, let it go. You need a true passion to make your dream come true, like a founder relies on the same sentiment to grow his business.

How to Put Passion in Your Pitch

The most important thing to keep in mind when you pitch is that if you are not interested in what you are saying, neither your audience will be. So, instead of worrying only about what you say, be focused even on how you deliver the message.

You need to put energy in your word, surprise your audience by stating something really hard to believe or simply unexpected, and once you got their attention you can start to pitch them your product or service. Or your dream.

You have to show pain for the problem you are addressing, trust for the solution you offer, and engagement in the developing process. All mixed with the aim of growing big. Even greater, in a hypothetical scenario that will be evident once you succeed.

Your passion represents the most important tool you have to bring people on board in your project. If you are able to share a genuine passion for what you are working on, then other people will feel involved in the journey and will consider helping you.

Share The Passion

To share your passion, you have at your side a few essential tools:

• Your voice: you will need it to affirm how much you care about your project. Alternate high and low volume to give a rhythm to your speech.
• Your physical person: while you will need to stand still, you will even have to move at any time, or at least make a gesture with your hands, to show to your audience you are alive, hopefully interacting with them by quoting something happening in the room or just giving a look to people seat in the middle of the lines.
• Your eyes: where you look is important because it provides an idea of interaction to the people you are chatting with.

The Problem

The easiest way to share your passion is to be truly involved in the problem you want to solve. Aka, your dream. You need to feel it fighting inside your heart, you need to work on it every single day, and you need to believe the world will be better once you have realized it. As Waze co-founder Uri Levine said at TechCrunch Disrupt, «Fall in love with the problem, not the solution, and the rest will follow.»

When I say that you need to have a problem, I mean you need to psychoanalyze your dream to understand if it’s a real dream, or it’s another one’s dream. As a matter of fact, there are dreams planted in your mind that seem to be coming from your heart, but didn’t. Indeed, you have to recognize what comes from inside and what is just a momentary suggestion. How can you do that? Pretty simple: a dream that is established in your heart is rooted in your past. So, each time you are about to start working on a dream, sit down, take a piece of sheet and a pen, and jot down all the events of your past that seem to have any relation to your dream. If you can connect these events with a line, you are on your way to your dream. Otherwise, it’s likely you felt in love with a simple idea.

Your dream must involve the others. Even if it’s an ultra personal vision, others will be at least beneficiaries of your activity. This could happen with the realization of your dream or even long after that.

A Personal Example

When I was a child, I started learning to code soon after my dad bought me an Atari. I didn’t know I love coding before; that computer came with the purpose of gaming. I never follow up on that dream because I ended up pursuing another passion. Few years ago, I sat down to learn HTML and CSS because I wanted to create my website from scratch. I never did it, but since then I created a few blogs and websites and what I learned came up to be useful to me and other people. Coding for me it’s a dream, a dream on the list of what I want to realize, soon or later. If you find that kind of connections among previous events of your life, you have a personal dream.

The Desire to Help Others

You can’t understand how much a dream is big if you don’t ask yourself who will benefit from your venture. The more they are, the bigger your dream is. Even if it’s a personal dream, so personal that apparently any other people will take advantage of it. Still, you have to image who could benefit of that in the future. If there’s, at least, one person, you have an audience waiting for you to come up with the result of your dream.

That one person could be even you. Well, this is not regularly, but your “future you” could represent a minimal audience to take into consideration. Say, for example, you are writing a diary nobody will read. This is apparently a fail, but it isn’t. First, because by writing a diary you are growing up personally and other people will benefit from it. And second, your future you could take advantage by reading your memories. If what you do helps you grow up and be a better person, this has an impact on all the people who care about you.

The Parts of the Pitch

Even if the most important, the problem is only a part of the pitch. A pitch begins with a statement, go through a story and end up by convincing an audience to act on it. Would it be investing in the project, joining the team or becoming a client.

Each time you pitch, you tell a story. And this story must contain:

• Title and tagline: the second one is crucial because it helps you stay on track. You can consider it as a condensed version of your unique value proposition, the most elaborated statement that define your journey.
• Opening statement: here you explain what you do, for who, and why anyone else can’t do it better than you;
• The team: this is you, and anyone else will help you get the job done, plus your mentors and advisors;
• The target market: as I wrote above, you need to identify who will “pay” for your work, even if it was only with their attention;
• The pain: aka, the problem;
• The solution: this is what you will do to realize your dream;
• The business model: how do you plan to sell your product, i.e. deliver the value you generated to other people;
• The competitors: in the business world, who other is working on a similar solution, but not as good as yours;
• The progress you did: you will have already spent time and invested in your dream, and we want to know in which part of the journey you are now;
• Numbers: stats that support your dream, such as the growing need, the people who are waiting for you to realize what you’re talking about, and hopefully something related to what you have already accomplished;
• The ask: when you do a pitch, you need to be focused on a request. Even if you are merely presenting what you are doing, the goal should be clear, such as involving the person in front of you in the project by planting an idea in them and forcing them to share it;
• The closure: restate the opening statement and tell us why the hell the world will be better once your dream is a reality.

There are a few elements of a pitch that can’t work if you don’t put passion into it. These are:

• The opening statement
• The pain
• The solution you came up with.

Even all the other elements require passion, but for these, in particular, you must show you truly believe in what you are doing, and pitching.

Taking the Dream out of You

When you pitch, your goal is to take the dream out of your heart and put it in front of your audience. You need them to touch it, live it and share it. Once they’ve done that, they are ready to come aboard.

You need them to understand your unique value proposition. You need them to share the journey with you from the pain to its removal.

And in the end, you need them to act on what you have shared. Every pitch must end with a call to action, especially if you are looking for support.

A call to action is a statement that make your audience act immediately. And the simple one, available for you every time you need it, is “now give me your feedback”. This request will help you improve your pitch and your project every time you recite your pitch.

Your Turn

So, are you ready to craft the pitch of your life? If you don’t, start sharing a dream. Pick one, maybe the one you have been working for years without getting any result, and share it with your friends. Follow the rules, break the rules, and post it on Facebook to get feedback. Iterate on it until it’s perfect. I. E., until you are able to pitch it in front of the mirror and persuade yourself to invest money to make this dream come true.