My Pitch Competition Experience

Before the middle of my junior year, I had won $250K+ in pitch competitions and other non-dilutive funding as a solo founder. In just pitch competitions alone, off the top of my head, I have participated in 18, won money in 12, and won the top prize at 5.

I was not pitching an easy company. I was pitching a highly regulated drug-device startup with no revenue, no commercial product, and roughly four years of development before an initial product could potentially reach the market.

That forced me to learn how to make judges believe in a company before traditional traction existed.

Across all of those pitches, three things consistently mattered more than almost anything else:

• Your story

• Your team

• Your customer discovery

You can have a beautiful deck, a huge market, and impressive technology, but judges still need to believe in the founder, the people around them, and the problem they are solving.

Why Your Team Matters

I had never raised money for a company before, much less built a pharmaceutical company. My advisors and eventually the team members I brought on had. They brought experience across drug-device exits, hundreds of millions of dollars in fundraising, product development, regulation, and the clinical landscape we were targeting.

That does more than fill gaps in your knowledge. When highly experienced people choose to spend their time helping your company, it signals to judges that people who may understand the industry even better than they do believe there is something worth building here.

It also tells the judges something about you. It shows that you can recognize what you do not know, find people who do know it, convince them to believe in your vision, listen to feedback, and turn outside expertise into progress.

Judges and investors do not expect a student founder to know everything. They want to know whether you are capable of building the group of people necessary to figure it out. Spend real time developing your mentor, advisor, and team network. Do not wait until the week before a competition and throw a few names onto a slide. For more on how to build a strong advisory team early, start here.

Why Customer Discovery is So Important

If you have users and revenue, great. If you do not, you need another way to prove you are not building your company entirely around assumptions.

For me, customer discovery was crucial. We did not have a product on the market, so I needed to demonstrate that we had spoken directly with the people who would eventually influence whether the product succeeded. Depending on your company, that might include:

• Potential customers or users

• Industry professionals

• Buyers or decision-makers

• Advocacy or community organizations

• Subject-matter experts

• Other important stakeholders

For us, that meant gathering perspectives from patients, physicians, healthcare providers, patient advocacy organizations, industry experts, and others across the ecosystem.

Do not just put “We interviewed 100 customers” on your slide. Tell the judges what those conversations actually proved. What percentage experience the problem? What are they doing today? What frustrates them about current solutions? Would they switch? What features matter most? Did something you learned cause you to change the product?

The strongest customer discovery shows that you did not simply decide a problem existed. You went out and asked the people actually experiencing it, then used what they told you to build a better company. For more on how to conduct effective customer discovery, start here.

Why Telling Your Story Matters

Judges are not only evaluating the company. They are evaluating you.

They want to know why the founder standing in front of them is committed enough to spend years solving this problem. If you have a genuine connection to what you are building, use it. That connection might come from something you personally experienced, something that happened to someone close to you, experience in the industry, research you worked on, or a moment that made you realize something needed to change.

You do not need to manufacture an emotional founder story if you do not have one. But if there is a real reason you care, do not bury it halfway through the presentation.

I like starting with it. Your first job is to make judges understand that the problem affects real people. Your second is to make them curious about how you are going to solve it.

My Winning Pitch Deck Order

There is no universally perfect pitch deck, but this is the basic structure that has worked well for me.

1. The Hook

Start with the person, situation, or story that makes the problem real. Make the judges care before throwing statistics at them.

2. The Problem

Clearly explain:

• Who experiences the problem

• What specifically is going wrong

• How often it happens

• What it costs them in money, time, health, convenience, or opportunity

Do not just prove that the problem exists. Show what the problem causes people to lose.

3. The Solution

Show exactly how you solve it. Focus on what the product does, why it is different, your most important novel features, and the specific benefits those features create.

You do not need to list every feature you have ever built. Highlight the things that actually make your solution better.

4. Market Validation

Show what your potential customers and relevant stakeholders are telling you. Include real findings from customer discovery rather than simply saying people “liked the idea.”

5. Traction

Show how far the company has actually come. Depending on the business, traction could include:

• Revenue

• Users

• Pilots

• Prototypes

• Intellectual property

• Partnerships

• Grants or competition wins

• Regulatory progress

• Product-development milestones

• Letters of interest

• Customer discovery

• Investor commitments

Early-stage traction does not have to mean revenue. It means evidence that the company is moving forward.

6. The Team

Now show why the people involved are capable of turning that progress into a real company. Focus on experience that is directly relevant to executing the plan, not just impressive names and titles.

7. The Market

Explain how large the opportunity can become. Depending on the company, this may include:

• TAM, SAM, and SOM

• Customer segments

• Market growth

• Comparable products

• Comparable companies or transactions

Keep the numbers grounded. A giant TAM with no explanation is not impressive.

8. Business and Financial Outlook

Show how the company eventually makes money and what the path could look like. This might include your business model, pricing, revenue projections, major development milestones, future financing requirements, or commercialization timeline.

If planning to get acquired or license your product, find comparable deals from similar companies and present these rather than just guessing.

9. Regulatory or Development Pathway, If Relevant

For healthcare, biotech, medical-device, pharmaceutical, and other highly regulated companies, I think this is especially important.

Show:

• What needs to happen

• Roughly how long it will take

• Major development milestones

• Regulatory milestones

• How much capital will likely be required

Judges need to know that you understand what stands between your company today and an actual product in the market.

10. The Ask

Do not finish with:

“We are asking for $25,000.”

Explain what their money actually accomplishes.

Something closer to:

“This $25,000 allows us to complete X, which gets us to Y milestone and positions us for Z.”

The judges should know exactly what changes for your company if you win.

For me, the order and number of slides usually stay the same regardless of how much time I’m given to pitch. I simply adjust how much detail I go into on each slide based on the time available.

I also personally prefer to memorize a script. It allows me to speak confidently without constantly looking back at the deck and makes the presentation feel more polished. That said, everyone has a different style. I know great student founders who simply know the main point they want to make on each slide and speak more naturally from there.

Make the Presentation Work for Your Team

If more than one team member is pitching, think about who should cover each section. You do not want:

Founder → technical lead → founder → technical lead → founder

constantly bouncing back and forth.

Group slides so each person can naturally cover the topics that match their expertise. If one person owns the technology, perhaps they cover the solution and development pathway together. If another owns commercialization, let them handle market and business strategy together.

The less unnecessary switching you have, the smoother and more professional the presentation feels.

Be Memorable

At most competitions, judges are going to sit through a lot of pitches. Being good is important. Being good and memorable is better.

The little behaviors matter.

Before the pitch, when the environment allows:

• Introduce yourself

• Shake the judges' hands

• Make eye contact

• Smile

• Make conversation

• Learn their names

• Act like you genuinely want to be there

When you are pitching:

• Speak confidently

• Project your voice

• Look at the judges instead of your slides

• Know the deck well enough that you are not reading it

• Let your personality show

• Be excited about what you are building

One unique thing I have intentionally done in smaller rooms is pitch without a microphone when the setting allowed it. I knew I could project clearly, and I wanted the presentation to feel more direct and energetic. Judges and audience members have specifically told me afterward that it helped me stand out and display confidence.

That does not mean you should refuse a microphone every time someone hands you one! The point is to find small, authentic ways to command the room and be remembered.

Do not walk on stage trying to imitate what you think a startup founder should sound like. Be yourself, but be the most confident, prepared, and energetic version of yourself.

Prepare for Q&A

Q&A can feel like the hardest part of pitching when you first start because there will inevitably be questions you have never thought about before. That is completely normal. The goal is not to magically know every answer on day one. The goal is to know your company inside and out and get better every time you pitch.

If a judge asks something you genuinely do not know, do not make up an answer or talk in circles trying to sound knowledgeable. Be comfortable saying that it is something you need to research further, and thank them for bringing it to your attention. A response like, “That’s a great point and something we still need to investigate further. I appreciate you bringing it up,” is much better than confidently giving an answer that is wrong.

When you do know the answer, answer exactly what they asked. One of the easiest mistakes to make is turning a 20-second answer into a two-minute speech filled with information the judge never requested. Listen carefully, answer the question directly, give enough context to support your response, and stop.

The good news is that Q&A gets dramatically easier with repetition. As you pitch more and more, you start realizing that there are only so many questions people can ask about your company. Eventually, you will have heard some version of almost all of them.

After every pitch, keep a running list of:

• Questions you had never heard before

• Questions you struggled to answer

• Questions that exposed a weakness in your business

• Questions judges ask repeatedly

• Questions where your answer felt too long or unclear

Then go back and prepare better answers before the next competition.

Over time, that list becomes your own Q&A playbook. You stop being surprised, your answers become shorter and sharper, and you walk into competitions knowing that there is very little the judges can ask that you have not already thought through. To get a simple Q&A playbook template, check out our Tools & Templates page.

The Biggest Takeaway

If I had to boil everything down, I would spend disproportionate time on story, team, and customer discovery.

Your story makes the judges care. Your customer discovery proves the problem is real. Your team makes them believe you have the people necessary to solve it.

Then build the rest of the deck around reinforcing those three things. Show the progress you have made, demonstrate that the opportunity can become meaningful, and finish by making it incredibly clear what winning their money allows you to accomplish.

You may not have revenue yet. You may not have a final product. You may not have raised millions of dollars. I did not either.

But you can still show judges that you deeply understand the problem, customers want something better, experienced people believe in your vision, you know what you do not know, and you are capable of figuring out what comes next.

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