Pitch Coach

Pitch coach

Source: points/frameworks.md (pitch and S.H.I.T. sections), points/kramon-master.md section VIII.

Two pitch modes

This skill handles both:

• Company pitches — VC, customer, journalist
• Personal pitches — LinkedIn bio, "tell me about yourself," cover letter, founding-story essay

The frameworks overlap. S.H.I.T. applies to both.

The 7-part pitch (companies)

1. What it does — plain English, one sentence, grandmother test
2. Differentiation — what's already out there and why you're different
3. Customer examples and endorsements — specific names, specific numbers
4. Market size and funding — TAM, dollars raised, runway
5. Superhero story — why you are the one to do this
6. News hook — why this is timely
7. Bigger trend — connect to the wave (especially if you're small)

The six-word test

Summarize the product in six words. If you can't, you don't know it well enough yet.

Examples:

• "Edited Pulitzer winners. Now teaching business leaders." (Kramon's bio)
• "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." (Hemingway)

If the user can't pass this test, work on it before anything else.

S.H.I.T. framework

Apply to both company and personal narratives:

• Simple — especially if your background is complex, simplify
• Heroic — position as protagonist; will they prevail? Stay tuned
• Inevitable — on the right side of history
• Timely — doing this now for a reason

Mission-statement template (4 sentences)

1. "This problem is a dire threat, even if most people don't know it."
2. "My company is developing the most elegant solution: [how it works]."
3. "We might fail, but the mission is so important we must try."
4. "Call to action: [specific ask — invest, join, legislate, hire me]."

Personal pitch — extra rules

LinkedIn bios and "tell me about yourself" answers have their own failure modes:

• Don't let the bots brand you. If you don't define your brand, someone else will.
• Wall of shame — kill these:
  • "I'm left brain and right brain"
  • "I build and scale to maximize impact"
  • "I'm drawn to complex problems"
  • "At the intersection of strategy, product, and execution"
• Tell stories, not bullet points — even in a bio
• Pick a thesis — what do you believe about your industry that others don't?

Delivered pitches — two extra rules

When the pitch will be spoken to a room (demo day, class vote, investor meeting) rather than read:

• Repeat the product name. The audience remembers one or two things per pitch; make the name one of them. Say it in the open, at the solution reveal, in the demo, and in the close — so when the voting sheet or partner meeting comes, the name recalls the pitch. Three to five repetitions across seven minutes is deliberate; more is a tic.
• Open on a person, close on the same person. Lead with a named persona living the problem ("Tony, an international student from Milan, can't rent an apartment — no US credit history"), not the technology. Explain the mechanism only through what it does for that person. Close by returning to them transformed. If the audience needs background knowledge to understand a slide, the slide is too technical for a live pitch — that language belongs in the written plan.

Consultants — the special case

The stigma is real. Elon, Vinod, Mark Andreessen all say they don't hire consultants. The perception: "PowerPoint jockeys" who empower, enable, and strategize but don't execute.

In every pitch, talk about projects you took from concept through execution. "This is what it looked like on launch day, and I did it."

Mode 1 — Draft from scratch

Walk through:

1. Six-word test (do this first; everything else follows)
2. S.H.I.T. — write one sentence per letter
3. The 7-part structure (or 4-sentence mission template for short pitches)
4. Cut to length

Mode 2 — Critique an existing pitch

Flag:

• Can't pass the six-word test
• Buzzword cluster ("at the intersection of," "driving innovation")
• Resume bullets where stories should be
• No "why now"
• No "why you"
• Missing the bigger trend
• Generic ("I'm passionate about complex problems")

When you finish

Hand back: (a) the rewritten pitch, (b) three alternative six-word summaries, (c) the S.H.I.T. breakdown one-line-per-letter so the user can use it in interviews.