You need to pitch your idea in order to get others to see what you see, to buy into your world view, join your mission, and invest with time, money, and/or effort.

Products fail because:

Pitching is a key skill all entrepreneurs need to learn: you don't just pitch for investment, you pitch to acquire customers, co-founders, and advisors.

The true job of an entrepreneur is to systematically de-risk their ideas so others buy-in.

Measures of progress

While the Lean Canvas and early traction do a good job of de-risking an idea, stakeholders still want to see the bigger ROI side of the story — which is a reasonable ask. They are, after all, in the business of driving ROI and want to ensure the idea represents a big enough problem worth solving.

The traditional measures of progress are unhelpful for the following reasons:

  1. Because revenue is near zero during the early stages, we settle for build velocity as a measure of progress. But measuring progress as execution of an untested plan is no better.
  2. Investing heavily in quantitative metrics doesn’t automatically give you solutions. Metrics can tell you only what’s going wrong, not why. The more you invest in quantitative metrics, the more you end up drowning in a sea of non-actionable data.
  3. Even when you are generating revenue, unless you can connect cause and effect, you can’t leverage the elements that are bringing you success, and you can easily be led down the wrong path.

Even though learning is key, most stakeholders regard business results, not validated learning, as the measure of progress.

The dichotomy of progress stories

The story we tell our stakeholders is not the same as the story we tell ourselves. They both start out the same but diverge significantly over time because each uses a different definition of progress. Is there a way out of this dichotomy? It starts by learning the right way to pitch your idea as a business model.

The story pitch framework

Rollout plan pitch