Step 2: Nail your 60 second pitch

The constraint of having to pitch your company in 60 seconds, is a forcing function for actually defining what you actually do. That's because it forces you to use concise and simple language to get to the root of what your start does. This is not only a communication exercise, it's an introspective exercise as well. I’ve seen founders pivot their entire idea on the basis of not “feeling” their 60-second pitch. There's hidden power in succinctness.

Your 60-second pitch should be versatile. It will be something that you can pitch to investors, but also tell a friend at a cocktail party. Jargon is your enemy here. Remember that investors can't invest in things that they don't understand.

You’ll need to answer 5 simple questions in order:

1. What do you do? - This should be straight forward, but punchy, since it's your opening line. A popular tool founders use is the high concept pitch (i.e., Uber for X), but the company you reference has to be well known, and the analogy has to be accurate 

2. Who are you to build this? - This is where you humblebrag. You want to communicate two things: a) how great your background is, and b) how it ties to your startup. Ideally, you found your problem at your last job, or it was something painful that you experienced personally. Think Reed Hastings’ getting charged a late fee by Blockbuster, which led him to start Netflix

3. What have you done? - this is your traction bullet. Ideally you have revenue or MAUs, but in lieu of that talk about how many people want your product (i.e., waitlist, GitHub stars). The key is to show a clear indicator that you are building something people really want

4. How big can this get? - This is your market slide. You want to do your analysis bottom up (Total number of customers x your fee), not top down (i.e., if we get 1% of this market, this’ll be huge). “Your fee” is key as it needs to be close to what you’re already charging, so it's believable

Next: Build a killer deck