• It’s time to get your presentation ready for investor pitching. Whether it’s a send-along deck or presentation that’s going to help you in your verbal delivery, the process can be overwhelming.

• There’s a lot riding on the line — and this causes many founders to go into existential survival mode. They try to include everything their business has done, is doing, and may do in the future to make their pitch as attractive as possible.

• There are so many applications for their solution and product. It can benefit different audiences in different ways, all too important to leave out. So it all goes in the deck. The fear of missing an opportunity overrides their ability to prioritize what needs to stay in the presentation.

• This is a recipe for disaster. What could be a great story — a great articulation of their company vision — is diluted to dust.

• Keep reading to see how the Golden Rule of One can save you from the same fate.

Focus your presentation with the Golden Rule of One

• The principle behind the Golden Rule of One is very simple.

• When you present your deck, there’s an investor on the other side of the table. That investor has likely never heard of your product and knows very little about your industry.

• And that investor, as hard as it may be for us to grasp, is just another person like you and me. Their brain processes information just like us. If your presentation is too overwhelming, nothing goes in. But if it’s simplified and told in a focused way, your message will land.

• The key word here is “focus”. Often, people will tell you that your vision and pitch need to be focused. This is partly to help you find the right path, but it’s also to help investors follow your story.

• Let’s look at how the Golden Rule of One works in practice.

Define one problem, one audience, and one outcome

• If you want to grab an investor’s attention and hold it throughout your presentation, distill your deck down to one problem, one audience, and one outcome.

• This will create a flow that includes all the right context in each step, while making it easy to decide what to cut.

One problem: what business process are you transforming?

• The first step is to define the single, most important problem you’re trying to solve as a business. So, despite the fact that you have many ideas springing to mind and lots of grand plans for the future, you need to choose just one.

• Why? By focusing on one problem, it shows investors that you won’t be distracted every time a squirrel crosses your eyes. They can connect to your journey with one clear destination in mind — instead of wondering which direction you’ll be heading in first.

• The best way to illustrate this is by remembering that Amazon started with books. Imagine that you’re an investor and, one day, a young Jeff Bezos walks in and says:

• “My vision is to create a website that you can buy everything on — A-Z books, cleaning supplies, fashion items, you name it. And everything will be delivered in one day. In addition to that, to get rid of the high cost of shipping, I’m going to get rid of carriers like UPS and I’m going to create a nationwide fleet of trucks to handle delivery. Oh, and we’re also going to go into bricks and mortar and buy nationwide grocery stores to analyze the data of human consumption. And to top all of that off, we’re going to launch AWS to compete for enterprise cloud services. By the way, on that last one, AWS will end up being our most profitable venture.”

• No, no, no, no, no! It’s all too overwhelming for anyone to invest.

• But, lucky for Jeff, he said something more like this:

• “The internet is booming, e-commerce is exploding, and the fastest growing vertical with the cheapest cost of operations to deliver is books (direct product demand, low return possibility, and no expiration or fitting issues). So let’s open the biggest online bookstore in the world.”

• The ability to focus not only serves you, it serves your audience as well.

One audience: who is most likely to pay for your solution to the problem?

• Once you’ve defined the problem you’re transforming, you need to work out who is most likely to pay for your solution — and why?

• Sure, there may be different audiences in different verticals who could be interested, but you need to narrow things down to just one audience you’re most confident about.

• In other words: find your low-hanging fruit.

• Once you’ve found it, you need to articulate why the process transformation is not just an opportunity for this audience but an urgent need. Urgency and benefit is key.

• I once worked with the most brilliant CTO, Alex Dizingoof. And, when sales came to him asking for endless features, he would say, “I can build it, but who is paying for it?”

• So research, research, research. Pull together data from your early founder-led sales and any other scrappy sales methods to date. Trawl through the numbers to find the audience most willing to pay for your product — the people whose daily lives you improve the most.

One outcome: what’s the one benefit your audience can’t live without?

• Last but not least, you need to define your number one benefit.

• There’s a saying in sales: “find a pain and drive it all the way to the close”. Well, the same goes for investor pitching.

• You’ve identified your problem and audience and you know exactly what process you’re trying to transform — all of which should lead you to a key outcome that you want to help them achieve.

• It could be cost reduction, higher margins, faster throughput. Whatever it is, focus on the key benefit that will make your audience say “yes” and pay up.

• If your customers come in for one reason and you waste time dwelling on all the other things your platform can do, you’re going to lose sales. The same goes for pitching the benefit of your product to investors.

Final thoughts

• When you’re crafting your presentation, keeping it focused isn’t just better for you, it’s also better for your audience. So instead of thinking about all things you’d like to get across, remember that your audience can only process so much information. And, as the old adage goes, less is more.