The pitch got shorter every time

I've pitched Lumora in a lot of rooms, but only two of them had money attached. I won Geekdom's Pitch It To Win It during San Antonio Startup Week, which came with a $1,000 check and a pitch video that has somehow passed 40,000 views. Then I made the finals of Austin Christian University's $25,000 competition, with the winners announced at SXSW. I didn't win that one. Most of what I believe about pitching comes from the gap between those two results.

The first ten seconds decide whether people look up from their phones. That's the whole game. Nobody in the audience owes you attention, and by the time you walk up they've usually sat through a string of openers built around a name and a mission statement. So I treat the first line like it's the entire pitch, because for most of the room it is. Everything after that only reaches the people you won early.

One clear problem beats three features. This took me embarrassingly long to accept. When you build something yourself, every feature feels load bearing, and the temptation is to cram all of them into whatever time you're given. But a room can hold one idea. If people leave knowing exactly what problem you solve, you did your job. The features are for the follow-up meeting.

Same thing with language. Numbers people can check beat adjectives. 'Growing fast' is decoration. A specific figure is a claim you can be held to, and judges can feel the difference.

Rehearsal was the least glamorous lesson. My rule now is to rehearse until I can be interrupted at any point and keep going. Judges cut in with questions. Timers go off early. If you memorized a script, an interruption sends you back to the top of the paragraph. If you actually know the material, you pick up mid-sentence and keep moving.

Then the uncomfortable one: losing a final teaches you more than winning a preliminary. The Geekdom win told me the pitch worked in one room on one night. Missing the ACU prize told me where the ceiling was, which is more useful information at a worse price. When the winners were announced at SXSW and Lumora wasn't on the list, I went back through the pitch line by line looking for what to cut and what to prove. The win never made me do that.

The same pitch got shorter every time I gave it. Every run exposed a sentence that wasn't earning its place, and out it went. What started as an explanation ended up closer to a claim (a shorter thing to say, and a harder one to argue with). I don't know which competition is next, but the version I bring will be shorter than the one that didn't win the $25,000.