For Starters #33: Your First Pitch is This One Sentence

TL;DR "I help [role] at [adjective], [adjective] [organization type] struggling with [persistent problem]."

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting - Week 1, Session 1 - to the current Beta.MN cohort on the value of articulating the problem founders are solving in a clear, compelling, and concise manner.

While we spent the bulk of the session iterating on value propositions there were 3 key points I highlighted some slides to set context. If you’ve been reading For Starters for any amount of time, these are things you’re familiar with, which I’ll briefly repeat for those that have recently joined (Welcome!).

1. Every Business is Currently Navigating 1 of These 6 Riskiest Assumptions.
   To avoid getting bit in the ass later, the 6 Riskiest Assumptions must be navigated in order. Most Founders I work with are at #1, some are at #2, a few are at #4. Judge your business’s status harshly - it will only help you accelerate faster later.
   

2. A Customer is an Individual Opening Their Wallet for Relief from a Persistent, Frustrating Problem.
   I too many hours struggling with founders because we didn’t have a clear definition of ‘customer’, this is now the definition I use. A customer is not Likes, Follows, Downloads, Comments, Personas, or Users. A customer is a specific role with the context of a larger organization with the ability to pay. Yes, there may also be Users and other Stakeholders in that organization, but they’re not paying customers. For Starters we’re laser-focused on paying customers.
   
   Persistent means they’re dealing with the problem regularly; multiple times a day, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. The more frequently they’re dealing with this problem the more frequently they’re directly experiencing the corresponding frustration and the more opportunities you, as solution provider, have to ensure your solution is actually helping. The more frequent the problem is experienced, the more opportunities you have to get it right.
   
   Experienced multiple times a day = 400+ iterations / year

   Experienced once a day = 200+ iterations / year

   Experienced weekly = 50+ iterations / year

   Experienced monthly = 12 iterations / year

3. Customers Won’t Wait.
Customers want relief now. Their pain and frustration is today. They’ll continue looking for solutions while you’re off building The Perfect Thing, and the longer it takes, the more likely they’ll find something else, and no longer be a be in the market for a new solution. There are ways you can help them today, and iterate toward The Perfect Thing.

This gets us to the only template you need when you’re starting something new. You don’t need a Business Model Canvas or a Lean Canvas or any kind of multi-page business plan, just this one sentence.

I help
[role] at [adjective], [adjective] [organization type]
struggling with
[persistent problem].

- Some common adjectives; specific geography, b2b/b2c/d2c, specific industry, employee count, revenue size, ambition/goal, some inflection point in the company lifespan; recently fund, recently exited.

- There are two slots for adjectives because: riches are in the niches.

This sentence does 6 things really well:

• it’s your answer to ‘what do you do?’ at networking events (a sign of a successful sentence is whether it starts a conversation or not)

• it reminds you who to schedule customer discovery interviews with.

• it reminds you what to discuss with them.

• it helps you calculate the total addressable market - if you’re going after investment dollars,

• it immediately evolves and iterates based on what you’ve learned about the world.

• But most important of all - it reminds you- your venture is about helping fellow humans.

Some examples (feel free to add yours to the comments):

I help
founders at B2B, SaaS, startups
struggling with
pricing.

I help
executives at B2B software firms with >$10M in annual revenue
struggling with
churn.

From my friend Elana at BeSample,

I help
researchers in behavioral sciences
struggling with
collecting representative data outside America.

From my friend Leah,

I help
engineering teams at tech organizations
struggling with alignment.

What’s your sentence?