Your pitch is strong on the problem and weak on the product

Technical founders are told, correctly, to lead with the problem rather than the product. Most take the advice seriously. Then the pitch fails anyway, and for the opposite reason to the one they were warned about.

I read a lot of decks. The commonest fault by a distance: eight excellent slides establishing a problem I now completely believe in, followed by two vague slides where the product should be. I finish it convinced there is a real problem and unable to tell you what the thing does.

Why the middle goes soft

Three reasons, and they are all understandable.

• Fear of sounding like a feature list. You were told not to list features, so you abstracted upward into outcomes and platforms and enablement, and the concrete disappeared.
• The curse of knowing it too well. What it does is so obvious to you that describing it feels condescending. It is not obvious to anyone else.
• It genuinely does several things. Rather than choose, you described the category. Categories are not memorable.

The test

After your pitch, could the person you pitched to explain it accurately to a colleague who was not there, a week later, without your deck?

That is the only test that matters, because that is what actually happens. Your champion repeats you to a finance person, an IT person and a boss. If they cannot, the deal dies quietly and you never learn why.

Your buyer cannot champion a feeling. They have to repeat you to someone who was not in the room.

Fixing the middle: three slides, in this order

One: what it is, in a sentence a twelve-year-old could repeat. Plain nouns. "It is a phone app your field staff use to record what they did on site, so the office does not have to chase them." Not a platform, not a solution, not an enabler. If your sentence contains a word your buyer would not use in the pub, cut it.

Two: what actually happens, concretely. The three or four steps a real person takes on a real day. Screens beat descriptions. A short walkthrough of one genuine workflow beats a feature grid every time, because it lets the buyer picture their own staff doing it.

Three: what changes as a result. Now you connect back to the problem you spent eight slides building. The before and after, in their numbers where you have them.

Problem, then mechanism, then change. The mechanism is the part everyone skips, and it is the part that makes the change believable.

Say what it does not do

A short honest exclusion buys more credibility than another claim. "It does not replace your finance system - it feeds it." "It will not help you if your team is not already on smartphones."

Buyers relax when you draw an edge, because it tells them the rest is real. It also filters out the deals that were going to fail in month three anyway.

Let the product lead if you have one

If you have a working prototype or product, use it as the spine of the pitch and let the deck support it. A live thing on a screen answers the "what is it" question in fifteen seconds and does it more convincingly than any slide.

Keep the deck to roughly a dozen slides doing the job the demo cannot: the problem framing, the size of it, the proof, and the commercials.

How to find your own gap

Cheapest possible test. Pitch someone outside your industry - a friend, an accountant, your sister. Then ask them, an hour later, to tell you what it does.

Whatever they say back is what your buyer will say to their boss. If it comes back thin, the middle of your pitch is thin.

So try it this week and listen carefully to the version that comes back. Is it yours, or is it the one you can live with?