Learning to pitch to potential investors can be an intimidating journey for a startup founder. The best way to improve your startup's pitch is to practice, practice, practice! Building a startup requires being able to sell your vision confidently. We asked some top venture capitalists who have invested in the region what they felt were the most common mistakes local startups make when pitching.

Champ Suthipongchai, Founding Partner at Creative Ventures

"The perfect pitch is about imperfection. I find it delusional when founders tell me how this is going to be a no-brainer. The best founders help walk me through all the risks, tell me exactly how this may go wrong, and present contingency plans. They admit on things they don’t know – rather than bullshitting their way through – and get back to me on critical information that was missing. It demonstrates not only experience and practicality of the founding team but also their humility and transparency. Above it creates trust and confidence, the most important currency in early stage investment."

 

William Bao Bean, Investment Partner at SOSV, MD at Mobile Only Accelerator

"Most entrepreneurs want to lead with what they have built, it's their baby and they want to show it off. Instead they should start with the problem they are solving"

Muai Porlanee Jeamsaksiri, Principal Fintech Corporate VC at Digital Ventures

"Usually it is not the pitch mistake. It is the business model!"

So, how can you improve your pitch before going in front of someone like Champ, William or Muai? Techgrind run a monthly event called SLAP (Speak.Learn.And.Pit­ch.) at the Dream Office at C Asean on the first Tuesday of every month. We asked organiser Pavel Laletin from TechGrind how the event works:

We usually have 10-15 different startups pitching, and 20-50 people attending. We focus on the pitch / presentation at the event, not how good or bad the idea is. We just want to make sure that the audience understands what they do and gets the idea fast. It should be a 5 minute pitch with 10-15 slides and 5 min Q&A / feedback from mentors and audience.

If you're interested, you can register for the next event which will be held Tuesday, September 6, 2016

at 6:30 PM on their Meetup page.