Pitch Forward Posted 2025-4-4

On LinkedIn, I just saw a post discussing "what's needed" to pitch at every round. (I unfortunately lost the item before I could grab a link.) It got me thinking. I observed that this is pitching from your accomplishments, your past accomplishments. It's backward-looking. It's far better to look forward in a pitch.  Let's explore.

I am about to use a lot of abbreviations. Most of them are standard start-up jargon.  I'll put a glossary below.

At a basic level, startup businesses go through similar phases of maturity, with each phase building on the previous. Here's my simple view:

Phase 0: Refining a Concept to (hopefully) solve a problem that some group of people/companies have.

Phase 1: Developing the Concept into an MVP and showing it to (hopefully) relevant people to get feedback.

Phase 2: Developing your MVP to get to Initial Product. PMF is the goal, but you might not quite get there.

Phase 3: Get from Initial Product to OMF - offering-market fit. Remember, it's not what you sell (the product); it's what customers buy (the offering).

Phase 4: Initial scaling of delivery and transition of GTM to repeatable Sales.

Phase 5: Scaling everything and tuning Marketing to to reduce CAC.

Phase 6+: Scaling and optimizing all operations.

Not all companies will follow this progression and, despite what you think I did, Phases 1-5 do not - necessarily - line up with Series Pre-seed, Seed, A, B, and C. It's just setting the framework for the discussion. However, for simplicity, let's assume you are going to pitch at the start of each phase.

What does that pitch look like? According to the LinkedIn article, the pitch for any phase should check off the previous phase. I agree that that's important, but it's not the pitch. Rather, the pitch should look forward. "Given the platform established by the previous phase, here's what and how we deliver in this phase... toward the vision of three or four phases hence."

And note that such a pitch leads to an obvious answer to the perennial question of "use of funds". The funds being raised will enable the resources to do the "what and how". The funds can easily be shown split up by various uses that trace back. And the milestones are what has to be achieved to get the next round of funding. Which brings us full circle to the original article I read.