The friend iteration method for pitch decks and YC apps

Thank you to Eric Chen, Tim Wee, Rick Barber, Charlie Songhurst, Konstantine Buhler, Stephanie Zhan, Kevin Hartz, Liu Jiang, Ron Bhattacharyay, Josh Singer, Garry Tan, and Ray Tonsing.

This advice especially applies if you have less than $1M ARR.

Confused investors won’t invest.

So, use the friend iteration method to improve the clarity of your pitch!

Instructions:

1. Start with one friend or family member that you haven’t talked about your company before with
2. Go through your deck or YC app with them, one slide/question at a time
3. After each slide, ask them to explain back to you: what is your product? who buys it? what do they buy it instead of? how are you going to reach users? how big is the market? Have them skip or say not sure for any that they don’t know.
4. Then, for everything they say that isn’t quite right, update your deck/answer, say it to them again, and ask them to explain it back again. Mindset: thank them, and view their confusions as your fault, not theirs.
5. Repeat for all slides and answers.
6. Repeat with new friends and family members until you get 3 people in a row who understand it well with minimal corrections needed.
7. Congrats, now you have a clear deck/app!

Startups need to a) be great and b) clearly communicate their greatness. Avoid the unforced error of being great, but not clearly communicating it!

Founders, you're welcome to DM or email me a redacted version of your deck or a loom walkthrough, and I'll DM back what I understand from it

love it. very clear / concise and super helpful

This is so so true!

I try and explain that the biggest increase in probability of a vc investing isn't whether they like it but whether they understand it

Increasing understanding leads to increasing odds of investment

Btw - imagine the investor has to write a medium article about your business - your job is to teach them so that article is superb

This helps with entrepreneurs getting it from abstraction to tangible

I think this is a very good idea and framework. Clarity is critical when pitching. The every-slide recursion might be a bit much. Perhaps trying to answer those questions at the end of each presentation or after every section could work well, as I can imagine a lot of back and forth with a 20-slide deck.

I think people should be able to summarize the whole pitch deck from beginning to end at the end of your pitch (one sentence per slide roughly). If they can’t do a 5-8 sentence summary, that’s probably bad (even if they can’t do it on a per slide basis)

Yes clear communication is being able to recreate an idea that is in your head in someone else's head with high fidelity!

It’s really good.  I like it.  It is a form of Pareto optimization applied to yc pitching.  U might clarify that it is the narrative refinement primarily as everyone should be compelled by the story and not have to understand the technical merits