Ran into an old mentor at a coffee shop in Portland last week

He sat down and told me I was spending way too much time on perfecting my pitch deck instead of just talking to people. Said he landed his first 3 investors just by grabbing coffee and asking what they cared about. Made me realize I've been hiding behind slides for 6 months. Anyone else ever get called out like that and immediately knew they were right?

3 comments

3 Comments

wesley_fox922mo ago

lol this hits hard. I was stuck for like 8 months obsessing over my website copy and demo video while my buddy just went to local startup meetups and pitched his idea over beers. He had his first customer before I even launched. What finally worked for me was setting a low bar like "just buy one person coffee this week and ask them one question about their biggest headache." No slides, no pitch, just listening. Once I stopped treating every conversation like a board meeting presentation, things actually started moving. The best part was realizing most people don't care about your perfect slides anyway, they just want to know if you can solve their problem.

cole_patel412mo ago

Those one-off coffee chats saved me too honestly. Did you ever get pushback from people who thought you were just wasting their time with an informal ask like that? I tried it and a couple folks seemed annoyed I didn't have a proper pitch ready.

casey_lane731mo ago

It's funny you mention that because I think the people who get annoyed are usually the ones who treat networking like a transaction instead of just... talking to another human. I had one guy literally check his watch when I said I didn't have a deck and just wanted to hear about his day. But here's the thing most people miss - those annoyed folks are actually giving you free market research. If they can't handle a casual coffee chat without getting huffy, imagine trying to pitch them something serious. I started filtering those people out early and it saved me so much time. The ones who actually helped me were the ones who'd text back "sure, Tuesday works, bring your curiosity not your laptop." lol