Romit Choudhury, founder and COO of conversation AI startup Softbrik, shares his tips on mastering the perfect pitch.
What kinds of pitches do you see and what is your main area of interest?
We participate in many startups and specific B2B events in the Telecommunication and Healthcare space across Luxembourg and Europe. The first category often has pitch competitions for younger companies sharing their ideas to a generic audience and jury for monetary prize and investment. For example we participated last month at the Arch Summit and Luxinnovation had Fit 4 Start competition where hundreds of young companies from across Europe and around the world participated and Silicon Luxembourg extensively covered.
The second category is a bit more niche where industry specialists share their projects as business cases and workshops for peer learning and feedback. For example at Medica, Düsseldorf where we participated with the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce in early November as a part of Bavaria-Luxembourg Trade Initiative, the digital health team of a well-known medical company pitched their new project to increase access to authentic health information online amongst under-served communities across Europe. Here they were not looking for money but rather feedback from health tech experts on how to increase the impact of their project and combat misinformation.
At Softbrik we capture user interactions from mobile and laptop browsers starting with voice messages that are converted to text and grouped by algorithms automatically for customer intelligence and response. The same technology is used by patients as it is easier for them to talk than type when sick. On the business or healthcare provider end, it is cheaper for them to respond back via voice messages instead of keeping many live agents. Hence our main areas of interest are Voice and Health Technology in Customer Intelligence and Support.
What was the best pitch you ever saw?
One of the most moving pitches I have seen in years was from Mohamed Orikat from Dubai and his prescription compliance company Voithy earlier this year at ICT Spring in Luxembourg. He is solving one of the most common daily problems where over 75% of people do not adhere to their medical prescription as advised by the doctor leading to insufficient healing or higher probability of recurrence of disease. What made this pitch powerful was:
- that it was personal: he started by talking about his mother’s challenge in following her doctor’s advice, thereby instantly building an emotional bond;
- he made it universally relatable: almost every one of us has struggled to adhere to our prescription fully or make an elderly parent or family member do so;
- we are in this together pitch: better medical adherence keeps us, the citizens, safer and healthier. It also reduces the cost of public health and ultimately uses our own tax money more efficiently which is a double incentive for better adherence.
He did not hide anything when it came to the competition and spoke very candidly and humbly about the struggles, whether they were structural challenges around underserved medical care across the MENA region or personal ones around financing a startup. He had a clear business model and value proposition for users and health providers. It was focused completely on solving a major problem and not on ‘selling’ the idea or yet another technical jargon around AI/ML or Blockchain etc.
Overall the pitch was so compelling that a lot of the audience went up after the pitch to speak to him including me. In fact, we at Softbrik are starting a collaboration with Voithy for the expansion of our Patient Data capture business in the MENA region, which is one of the concrete outcomes of that short pitch!
What are your golden rules for pitching?
Start with a relatable hook to grab attention in the first 15 seconds. For example at Softbrik we capture user-device interactions so, I start my set with a standard line: “Today you will touch your phone more than your spouse, kids, pets or any other living being…sad but true!” People immediately start nodding and that ‘agreeability’ makes them open to listening to the pitch more actively. Plus agreeing builds likeability as we all like people we agree with.
Give a concrete example to explain the project and ideally give participants a sense of purpose. Look at the two following statements:
“Our platform helps oil companies to achieve important ESG metrics as defined by UN and EU 2030 goals”
vs.
“Every time you drive or fly, you contribute a little unknowingly to melting the icebergs. Our platform reduces your CO2 footprint by helping fossil fuel companies shift to sustainable energy sources.”
The first statement is an abstract bureaucratic concept, the second makes me feel that I can do something good too by joining this movement.
Allow questions at 30%, 70% and 100% presentation. If you are a seasoned presenter, take a few questions midway. Often people will ask questions for which you have an exact answer later helping them to agree with you (again builds agreeability bias). If they ask a question that is in contravention to your later slide, you can adjust the narrative a bit to mitigate any objection they might have had.
For example: As we work in conversation AI and voice-to-text messages, we often hear objections like “I don’t like to listen to voice messages” early in the pitch. We mitigate that by saying: “exactly, neither do we like to listen to voice messages, that is why we transcribe them to text. We even delete all the awkward pauses and extract key context with AI to save you further time even better than reading a regular text!”
So I have mitigated their objection, agreed with them and proven that our workflow is an even better version of what they are doing currently. This early objection handling removes the doubt in the mind of the listener, and she/he becomes an active listener again instead of ‘carrying’ the question till the end of the presentation to ask me and missing half of the presentation details.
Practices to avoid include:
Too much jargon and too small slides. Every technical person, including me, has been guilty of this.
Assuming others know the industry as well as you do. Investors listen to hundreds of pitches and most come to the EU from a finance background without industry knowledge (this is a broader structural problem that we have so few founder-first investors, but entrepreneurs need to be aware of that).
Not understanding the investor profile and incentives. A lot of startups, especially in a young eco-system like Luxembourg, pitch to every available fund. I have a retail/SaaS background and yet get requests around fintech/crypto all the time in which I have neither expertise nor interest. Knowing the expertise of who you are pitching to and what is their incentive is also critical. For example, if the fund is at the late stage of maturity and the investors like to be long-partners, they would not invest in an early-stage startup that they cannot carry through the next successive rounds.
