The day · Page 53
The four-part pitch, with Jenny's four elements
[GIVE THIS TO THE ROOM · the pitch structure, also printed as a card in Appendix A]
Your pitch is four parts in ten minutes. The structure is mine; the craft inside each part comes from pitch coach Jenny Lindblad, whose "four elements" of a short pitch map onto it almost exactly.
1. The user and the brief (one minute). Open with a hook, not a greeting. Jenny's rule for first lines: if your opening sentence could open anyone's pitch today, it is not a hook yet. The strongest hook in this room is what a real user did an hour ago: "Marta had 90 seconds to find an outfit. She gave up at four minutes." Then one line to anchor the brief. Make the room feel the user's problem before you show anything; Jenny teaches that the problem is the doorway and the solution only matters to people who have walked through it.
2. What you built (two minutes, live demo). Show it, do not describe it. One path, the click that proves the idea, on the real prototype. Jenny's advice on clarity applies double under time pressure: explain what is different about your answer, not how it works, and say it plainly enough that a twelve-year-old would get the value. Jargon does not make you sound senior. It makes the judges stop following, and a judge who stops following does not ask for clarity. They just score you down.
3. What the test showed (one minute). One thing that worked, one thing that did not, told as behaviour: "we assumed she would skip the tutorial, and she did. We assumed she would find saved looks, and nobody did." A failed assumption reported honestly scores better here than a suspicious perfect run, because the rubric pays for learning, not polish.
4. The ask (thirty seconds). Jenny is blunt about this one because founders forget it: decide your one ask before you open your mouth, and end on it. Not "so... yeah, that is us." Name what you want: "we want the go: two weeks to fix the saved-looks flow and test again." A pitch that trails off hands the decision back to chance.
That is five minutes. The other five belong to the judges, and the next pages cover both sides of that.