A winning pitch that never once mentioned the product

Alejandro Cremades once sat on a panel judging a startup pitch competition. Among the entries was a company built around a simple, almost clinical idea: an on-demand marketplace connecting people with psychologists, something one might describe, as Cremades does, as the Uber for psychologists. But the founder who won that day didn't lead with the technology, or the market size, or the matching algorithm. She explained why she had built it: a mental illness in her own family had shown her, up close, how hard it was to find the right help at the right moment. By the time she finished, Cremades writes, her story had nearly brought the crowd to tears. She won.

That moment captures something Cremades treats as one of the most underused tools in fundraising: storytelling. He points to brands like TOMS, Patagonia, and Dollar Shave Club, all of which grew in part because they gave people a story to hold onto, not just a product to buy. Zappos leaned on its culture. Airbnb rode the idea of a sharing economy. Even Apple's story, for a long stretch, was really the story of Steve Jobs. Every company has a story whether it uses it or not, Cremades argues; the only choice is whether you tell it, or let someone else make one up for you that may not serve you at all.

This matters more than most founders assume, partly because of something else Cremades is unusually direct about: the business plan, the document founders often spend months polishing, typically plays a role in at most about ten percent of the actual decision to fund a company, unless it's genuinely terrible. The rest of the decision, he says, is made through everything else, the pitch, the team, the story, long before anyone sits down to read fifty pages of projections. In many cases, the decision to invest happens before the business plan is even requested; it gets read afterward mostly as a box to check during due diligence.

Cremades's practical suggestion is almost old-fashioned: keep a daily journal. Not for its own sake, but because the details that make a story land, the specific moment, the specific stakes, tend to blur with time. Writing them down while they're fresh means you'll actually have them to draw on later, whether that's in a pitch, a deck, or a room full of strangers deciding whether to believe in you.

Start keeping a running journal today of what led you to this idea, the specific moment or frustration behind it, because the details that make a story land fade fast if you don't capture them. Once you have material, find the single human stake in your business, the person or problem that makes it matter, not just the market gap it fills. Ask a friend, mentor, or professional storyteller to read what you've written and tell you honestly which parts hit hardest, since you're often too close to your own story to see it clearly. Then restructure your pitch so it opens with why the business exists, saving the mechanics and specs for after you've made someone care.