Well, a lot of founders at some point hear about the importance of the pitch, right? But many of them have a very limited understanding of what a pitch is about, and some actually think that a pitch is that one universal thing, which is not the case at all. Consider pitch as just a general word for many, many different formats aimed towards very different goals. For example, we have different types of pitches, like an elevator pitch, investor pitch, or partnership pitch. All of them serve completely different purposes, and thus your pitch should be written accordingly. Regardless of what type of pitch we’re talking about, of course it is important to prepare it top notch. It should be perfect. It should not be generated. Every word in the pitch, regardless of its size, should be precisely and masterfully crafted. Every word has a meaning in the pitch, right? So let’s start.

Stripe Atlas makes the same useful observation behind this list: founders pitch to prospective employees, investors, and customers in different conversations.

1. One sentence pitch

A one sentence pitch is probably the easiest, the most simple looking one, but actually it is probably one of the hardest. If you can explain your product in only one sentence, make it completely clear, and make your listener desire this product, then consider yourself a master of pitching, because this is an extremely difficult task. You only have approximately seven seconds to deliver, which is a very short amount of time. So here precision is everything. The precision, pretty much the craftsmanship of the words and the ideas, is at the highest level here. The goal of a one sentence pitch is basically for your listener to have that click. They should immediately get the full picture, or at least the full understanding of what it is about. You want them to have that click. If that click happened, consider yourself lucky, but it’s difficult even for seasoned founders.

One sentence, one clear picture
“An AI-powered solution revolutionizing discovery.”→“An app that lets families share short videos.”
Illustrative rewrite, inspired by Y Combinator's advice to describe what the product actually does. YC's application guide also favors a narrow, understandable description over a vague grand vision.

2. Elevator pitch

An elevator pitch is somewhat similar to a one sentence pitch, but it can be up to approximately a minute. Sometimes it’s extended to two or three minutes, but consider the standard around a minute, right? So now you have to give the complete clear picture of your product in only a minute. The trap here is that you have to pack the whole meaning, the whole idea, and make it completely clear, while still delivering the main idea in approximately the first three to seven seconds. If you fail to do that, you’re done. You’re done. You’re gonna lose the attention of the listener, and regardless of what you’re gonna talk about afterwards, the attention is gone. Can you recover this? Yeah, you can, but it’s already wasted time. So even when you have one minute, use the beginning exceptionally carefully and make sure you deliver. Basically consider it a one sentence pitch with additional details afterwards, right? Make sure the listener remembers one thing, but remembers it clearly.

The elevator has room for one idea
First: what it doesThen: who needs it and whyFinally: a reason to keep talking
My compression of YC's clear-first approach. Sequoia's full investor story covers ten areas; an elevator conversation is the invitation to hear that story, not the whole deck.

3. Customer pitch

Your customer doesn’t care about your product as much as you do, right? In most cases. And actually it should be that way, because as a founder you should love your product. You should adore it. But make sure you show only that part your product solves that actually makes them interested in whatever you talk about next. The hook in the beginning should address something the customer actually feels. If it doesn’t, if the customer doesn’t feel their pain there, you lose them. And that’s the worst thing you want to have in a customer pitch. After you successfully, hopefully, deliver the hook, you have to give them the proper solution, and it should address it in a very targeted manner. You don’t want to sell everything. You want to sell the solution. Nothing else. No left, no right. You always have to understand that the customer doesn’t want to waste time. Their attention span is quite short, and they are interested in one thing: okay, what can you give them to solve this, right? If you managed to make your customer understand that you understand what they need and can actually solve it, consider yourself lucky, because that’s your potential buyer.

A discovery call can change the pitch
Ask about a recent problem→Listen and clarify→Show the relevant solution
Illustrative flow based on HubSpot's discovery call questions and active listening guide. These are prompts for learning what matters to that customer, not a script to read at them.

4. Investor pitch

The investor isn’t really buying your product. They are not always in the position of the customer, right? I understand there are different types of investors, but let’s talk about the more general case. Investors are buying the possibility that your company becomes much bigger than it currently is. Yes, product matters here. Yes, they should understand the product, but the product itself is not the only focus. What you actually want to explain is the current market, the timing, the distribution, the growth. Why your thing is the next big thing, you know what I’m saying? Why can this become large? Why doesn’t somebody else just do the same thing and do it better, right? And you have to prove to investors that you are the person, and mind you, I’m saying person, not the company, who can actually pull it off. That you can make the investment work and make the investors happy, right? So your personality is extremely important here, because the investor trusts you. They should want to sign a deal with you for years. This is almost as important as choosing, well, a family in a way, because hopefully this is for a long time.

~1,000 listingsAirbnb when Sequoia first met its founders in 2009
Sequoia says the founders' storytelling drew them in while Airbnb was still small. Its pitch structure asks founders to explain timing, market, model, team, and vision alongside the product.

5. Demo pitch

Here your product should do a lot of the talking for you. And this is exactly where many founders make a mistake, because they keep talking and talking while the actual product is sitting there waiting to be shown. If your product can demonstrate its value visually, then show it. Don’t spend five minutes explaining what I’m gonna see in the next 30 seconds. Show me the problem, show me how annoying or complicated it currently is, and then show me how your product solves it. Ideally, the listener should have that same click again, but this time the click comes from actually seeing the thing work. Another mistake here is trying to show everything. Every button, every setting, every little feature which you are personally very proud of because you spent three months building it. The listener doesn’t care. They care about the moment where they understand, okay, this thing actually makes my life easier. Everything else can come later if they are interested.

Let the moment happen
Problem→One interaction→“Oh.”
Original diagram. Stripe Atlas advises starting a demo at the useful result. It also recounts how a roughly 20-second Meitre demo changed a YC interview after partners initially compared it to OpenTable.

6. Partnership pitch

Here you’re not really selling the product directly, you’re selling the idea that working together makes sense for both sides. And this “both sides” part is extremely important. A lot of partnership pitches are actually just very nicely written requests for a favor. “We love your company, we love your audience, we think we can create something amazing together”, and then somewhere underneath all of that there is basically “please give us access to your customers.” That’s not really a partnership. In a proper partnership pitch you have to explain what they get, what you get, and why together you can create something that makes more sense than both companies just continuing separately. It should be targeted. Why them specifically? Why now? Why does this particular partnership make sense? If you can replace the name of the company in your partnership pitch with another company and the pitch still works perfectly, then your pitch is probably way too generic.

Illustrative partnership test
What they bring+What you bring=Something useful for both
Illustrative framework, not a quotation or historical example. It applies Stripe Atlas's audience-first pitching principle to a partnership conversation.

7. Hiring pitch

And yes, hiring is also a pitch. Especially if you are a small company and you are trying to hire somebody actually good. Because mind you, that person probably has options. You are not doing them some incredible favor by giving them a job. You are asking them to spend a pretty significant part of their life working on your product, your company, your problems, your vision. So you have to sell them this vision as well. Of course salary matters, conditions matter, all of this matters, but especially in a startup people also want to understand why they should care. Why does this company deserve to exist? Why is the work interesting? Why are they gonna have an impact here? Why should they choose you instead of some much bigger and safer company which probably pays well and has much less chaos? And please don’t sell somebody one version of the job and then give them a completely different one after they join. Yeah, technically you hired them, congratulations, but you also immediately taught them not to trust you, which is probably not the greatest beginning of the relationship.

The candidate's side of the pitch
What am I building?Who am I building it with?Why will this matter?
Illustrative questions. OpenAI's careers page and interview guide are real examples of a company explaining work, mission, and collaboration to candidates.

8. Comeback pitch

The comeback pitch is probably one of the most overlooked ones, because many founders treat “no” as if the whole relationship with that person is permanently finished. It doesn’t have to be. Maybe an investor said no six months ago. Maybe a customer said the product was missing something. Maybe a partner didn’t see enough value at that point. But now something changed. You got traction, you fixed the problem, you changed the pricing, you built the feature they needed, the market changed, whatever. Now you actually have a reason to come back. And here the biggest mistake would be to pretend that the first conversation never happened and just send them another generic pitch. Use the previous conversation. If they told you something was wrong, tell them, “you were right about this, we changed it, and here’s what happened.” That’s actually a very strong position because you’re not only showing progress, you’re also showing that you can listen. And being able to listen, especially as a founder, is actually much rarer than it should be.

A reason to come back
“You said X was missing.”→“We changed X. Here's the result.”
Illustrative wording, not a historical pitch. Stripe Atlas recommends showing concrete evidence of progress rather than relying only on future claims.

And I think that’s the main point about all of these pitches. Pitch is not one universal speech which you learn by heart and then throw at every single person you meet. Same elevator, different floor, different pitch, right? Every person wants something different from you, every situation has a different goal, and therefore the pitch itself has to change. Sometimes you have seven seconds, sometimes you have an hour. Sometimes you have to talk about the product, sometimes about the market, sometimes about the person you’re talking to, and sometimes you actually have to shut up and listen. But regardless of the format, every word should be there for a reason.