Courtesy of Janine, originally made for the Web3 Summit Synergy Hackathon, July 2025.

Generally, pitching follows along a few dimensions that can make it great or not so great. Content, Story, Voice, Body Language, Strategy, and Nerves.

At the end of this guide, we kept some goodies focusing on language and NLP. This is the 303 level for those more experienced

Content

Your Deck: Less text, more visuals. If it's text-heavy, kill half of it, then kill half again. Think Instagram story, not Wall Street report.

Font & Colors: Your slides should look good from the back row. Design can go a long way. Wont kill you if bad, but will instantly uplift your presentation (especially if you’re investor hunting)

Story

Structure: Arc, suspense, jokes.

WIIFM (What's In It For Me?): Always answer this. Translate your tech into real-world value people actually care about.

Show, Don't Tell: Always try to show, don’t tell. “Our transaction runs at 2sc, that’s twice as fast as XYZ > we’re fast.”

Money Moments: Your opener and closer will be remembered most. Make sure you have these nailed on both content, point, and visuals.

• I.e. I open with a picture of ‘happiness is positive cashflow’ because I want people to associate money, and because it’s funny.
• I close with either showing our traction or our team, because I want them to remember that we are highly competent people.
• Find your version of the above

Voice

Tonality matters. Ups, downs, pauses - for the love of god, please do this. DO NOT READ OFF THE SCRIPT

Project to the back row. Breathe intentionally. Use pauses for emphasis.

No mumbling. Talk like you're excited to be there, even if you're internally panicking.

How to speak freely. I prefer to remember a couple of points per slide, and then built them together as I go. Some people like to write it all out and memorize, which often leads to them just reciting and not actually talking to the person. For each slide, know your ‘emergency’ points. The ones you def want to get across.