Pitch like a pro: Top tips from Diolog’s Amy Benson and SeenCulture’s Nikki Tugano
What makes a winning pitch? Founders Amy Benson and Nikki Tugano share their top tips for pitching to investors.
It’s something every startup founder does, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it.
So what makes a winning pitch?
Earlier this year, SmartCompany editor in chief Simon Crerar hosted a webinar with Diolog founder and CEO Amy Benson, who won SmartCompany’s the Pitch in 2023, and SeenCulture founder and CEO Nikki Tugano, who was shortlisted for the same competition.
The two founders shared insights into the key things you need in your pitch deck, how to capture attention and show traction, and how to prepare for a live pitch.
Here’s what Benson and Tugano had to say.
What should be in your pitch deck
Tugano’s startup SeenCulture is a decision intelligence platform designed to help companies with pay and performance reviews, team design and succession planning.
Building on her experience in creating inclusive and high-performing teams, Tugano founded the startup in 2022 and recently raised $1 million in funding from a roll call of prominent investors, including LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson Fund.
In her experience, pitch decks should “always lead with vision”.
“What is the big grand vision? What impact do you want to have with what you’re building?”, she said.
Each startup or founder has a “compelling story”, and you should aim to connect your pitch with that story, said Tugano.
“Why is it that you’re the right person, or you’re the right founding team to be solving this problem?” she said.
“At the very early stage, obviously it’s quite premature to expect product-market fit, but what you can do is demonstrate how you have found a product fit.
“So leaning into your story, how you’ve come to the conclusion about this being the problem to solve, and what you’re going to do to really cut through against any other potential incumbents coming in.”
Tugano said pitch decks also typically include things like the problem you are trying to solve, the solution, and the size of the potential market.
But there’s one area that is often overlooked: the why now?
Here Tugano is talking about “the urgency around needing to invest in this or pay attention to this particular problem right now, and understanding beyond that”.
It is essential to also speak to the competitor landscape, said Tugano, “so that investors can really orient where you sit within that so that you’re doing what you can to address any questions that they might have in their mind that may object to your why now or your proposition”.
Benson, who founded Diolog in 2023 to help companies communicate better with their investors, has considerable expertise when it comes to pitching. She has won two pitch competitions, including SmartCompany’s the Pitch in February 2023.
She agreed with Tugano that tapping into a sense of urgency is vital.
“I describe this as: what’s the megatrend,” she said.
“What is the rising tide that is pulling your startup or floating it – you compare it to the boat in the rising tide – into reality? What’s pulling it there?”
This forms one of three key components that the Diolog team uses in its pitch decks, said Benson. The other two are “why you” and “why this”.
“That encapsulates everything … around your competitor landscape, your value proposition, where you sit in terms of your product-market fit and traction and things like that.”
If you only have a matter of minutes to pitch, most of that time should be spent showing how well you understand your problem, said Benson.
“How well do you know it? Can you provide the validation that you know it? Or maybe you’ve gone out and done the research that shows that you know it, or you have testimonials that prove it’s a problem, or you’ve experienced it yourself,” she said.
“Best-case scenario, you say yes to all of those.”
How to capture investors’ attention
So you’ve worked hard on your pitch deck. How do you use it to capture the attention of potential investors?
Both Tugano and Benson said using analogies can be a powerful tool.
“When you can shortcut … [investors’] ability to understand what your intent is or what your business is set out to do, it helps really make the value proposition very concise,” said Tugano.
That said, “it only works if they understand the analogy,” said the founder.
“As an example, for instance, for SeenCulture, what I often reference is that we are the Moneyball but for teams in organisations. The analogy only works if you’ve seen the movie or read the book, but it doesn’t work if you haven’t, which means that I have to have a back-pocket analogy or reference.”
This usually involves relating the problem directly to the person Tugano is speaking with, especially if that person has previously felt overlooked or undervalued in a work team.
“Then I’ll start to weave in my own personal story as it reflects what I expect they might have some level of experience with and personal connection to,” she explained.
“Because someone’s going to buy so much more into what you’re pitching out there if they resonate personally with the problem beyond just seeking how it might be a great return on investment opportunity as well.”
Early on, Benson described what she was building at Diolog as “the Xero for investor relations”.
“Because Xero, like Diolog, disrupted a legacy industry – accounting, boring – but they brought in this new, very cool software that’s now a billion-dollar company,” she said.
Ultimately, it comes down to how you tell your story, said Benson.
“One of the best pieces of advice I got before going into the Pitch was, what do you want to leave the audience feeling?” said Benson.
“So if it’s five judges at a pitch competition, do you want to leave them feeling super impressed and confident, or do you want to leave them feeling like, ‘Oh, wow, I don’t want to miss out on this’, or fo you want to leave them feeling really frustrated about your problem as well”?
How to show traction
Startup investors often want to see traction, but there’s different ways of showing this, said Benson and Tugano.
When talking about her pitching experience with Diolog, Benson used the words ‘traction’ and ‘evidence’ interchangeably.
“It’s all about validating the problem and validating the why now, why you, why this,” she said.
This can include both quantitative and qualitative evidence of varying sizes.
“When we pitched, we focused on consumer validation and tech validation, so showing that we had people who had provided feedback and were really keen on solving this pain point that they’d been dealing with for so long,” said Benson.
“Then on the other side of that, we also had more quantitative validation of, ‘yes, nine out of 10 IR professionals would use this type of software’.”
Tugano said traction doesn’t necessarily have to be about revenue. Rather, it can be about “doing what you can to really qualify a lot of the research that you’ve done and thinking that you’ve done”.
“You might not have a clear go-to-market strategy yet, or maybe you’re still working out your business model and your pricing model, but some level of insight that you’ve done, and you’re doing, that thinking,” she said.
How to prepare for a live pitch
Pitching your startup in a live setting can be scary, so Benson and Tugano’s advice is to practice, practice, practice.
“I just practised literally every minute leading up to the Pitch – very type A of me,” said Benson.
“But my hack for preparing for the Q&As was I tried to get the pitch in front of as many people as I possibly could before the night.
“So I was dragging in friends. I was dragging in friends of friends that I hadn’t even met. I was dragging in people who were in the office next to us, as many people that I’d never talked to as possible so it would feel real.
Benson also asked these listeners to ask her as many “hard questions” as they could think of, until she had a “bank” of hard questions that she could confidently answer.
“Then on the night, the questions that were asked, I think five out of six of them I’d already been asked before, so I had a response that I could say that I wasn’t just plucking out of thin air,” she said.
“Once you switch your brain into receiving feedback and acknowledging it as a means of improvement, I think it’s so much easier to view the pitch as like, ‘okay, this is something that I’m working on and I want to improve’, and just workshop it all the way to the night.”
Tugano also stressed the importance of practising answering questions about your startup.
“The Q&A is so important for investors to be able to assess your ability to stand up to robust challenge and come back with a really clear and concise response to whatever they’re challenging you on, or wanting to explore a little bit more on,” she says.
And every pitch is an opportunity to reflect and learn, said Tugano, who noticed she was using certain “filler words” when she sat down and watched videos of herself pitching.
“I say um too much, or I pause when I shouldn’t, or I stutter when I shouldn’t,” she shared.
“So [it’s] recognising what those sorts of things are so that you can be really proactive in trying to manage them, so that you’ve got a really clear, compelling, and as close as you can get to, a perfect pitch.”
For more advice about pitching your startup, watch the full webinar with Benson and Tugano here.
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