Before you build your pitch, answer these questions
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Before you build your pitch, answer these questions
One mistake I see entrepreneurs make all the time is starting the pitch too early.
They get excited about an idea and immediately open PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides to start building a deck. I get it. It feels productive. It feels exciting. It feels like momentum.
But it’s not where you should start.
A pitch deck is not where you figure out the business. It’s where you communicate the business. And if you haven’t done the thinking first — if you haven’t validated the idea — the pitch will show it.
You can have a problem slide, a solution slide, a market slide, and a business model slide, and still not have good answers to the questions that really matter:
- Who is this for?
- How do you know the problem is real?
- What are customers doing today instead?
- What makes your solution different?
- Why is this the right market?
- How will you make money?
- What’s solid, and what’s still a guess?
Those are the questions that build a real business. They’re also the questions too many entrepreneurs skip, because making slides is easier than slowing down to validate the idea.
And that usually leads to one of two problems:
The two problems with pitching too early
- Either the pitch is vague because the thinking is vague.
- The pitch sounds more certain than the business really is.
Neither helps.
A good pitch is not about sounding polished. It’s about showing that you understand the business underneath the idea.
Do the thinking before the storytelling
That’s exactly why we built Idea Canvas.
It helps you do the thinking before you jump into storytelling. You can pressure-test assumptions, look at real market signals, and get honest feedback on what’s strong, what’s weak, and what may need to change. Because once you’ve done that work, the pitch gets much easier. You’re not guessing what to say. You’re building the pitch around what you’ve already learned.
That’s also why we launched our new Pitch Presentation feature.
First, validate the idea. Then, build the pitch around what you learned.
That’s the right order.
Sabrina Parsons
Sabrina has served as CEO of Palo Alto Software since 2007. She and her husband, Noah, founded a UK software distribution company in 2001 that was acquired by Palo Alto Software in 2002. Sabrina is a successful Internet expert, having served as Director of Online Marketing at Commtouch, Senior Producer at Epinions, and founder of her own Web consulting company, Lighting Out.
