Day 9 · Make your message stick, then say it in a minute

By Karthik Nagapuri · 2026-09-22 · Draper Founder Program #2

A founder's guide to messaging from Day 9: Archana Purohit's full "Say it so it sticks" masterclass (four hurdles, STICK, one core for many audiences, investors, hires, institutions, websites), then Aaliyah from Draper on what investors look for and what one-minute pitches expose.

Day 9 had two halves that turned out to be the same lesson. In the morning, Archana Purohit (three-time founder, business coach, fractional CMO and author) ran a messaging masterclass that took the one-line statements every founder in the room had written about their company and quietly dismantled them. In the evening, Aaliyah from Draper flew in from San Francisco, answered questions on what investors actually look for, heard the stories from Survival Day, and then asked every founder to pitch in one minute. By the end of the night I had watched the morning's theory play out a dozen times in real time. The founders with a sharp, specific sentence got a sharp, specific response. The ones who led with a category got a polite "I don't actually get what you're doing."

This chapter is written for anyone who has to explain what they are building: a student with an idea, a first-time founder, an operator about to leave a job. The frameworks are Archana's and Aaliyah's. Archana also shared her deck with the cohort after the session, so this chapter walks through all twelve of its sections, alongside what she said in the room. The mistakes, occasionally, are ours.

The day's programme

• Morning: Messaging Masterclass, "Say it so it sticks", with Archana Purohit.
• During the day: a session with P.N.S. Murthy (Manage Ego; former Head of Values at GMR Group). I do not have notes from it, so it is not covered here.
• Evening: investor Q&A with Aaliyah (Draper), a Survival Day recap, and rapid-fire one-minute PSMBT pitches reviewed by Aaliyah and SK (Draper University India).

One business, many audiences

Archana's deck opens with a single idea that the rest of the day hangs from. A startup does not have one audience. It has at least four, and each one is looking for a different reason to say yes.

Your product stays the same. The message changes according to what the audience needs to understand, believe and decide.

• Archana Purohit, Messaging Masterclass

Two instructions hide in that line. A discipline: your product stays the same, so you do not invent a new company for every room. And a skill: ask what this particular person needs to understand, believe and decide. Most founders write one message and hope it serves all four audiences. It rarely serves any of them well.

Every message has four hurdles

She opened the session by telling us to keep our statements face down. She wanted us to hold on to them until the end, because by then we would have "a different version of your statement." Then she put up four words.

What I liked about her deck is that each hurdle comes with the specific way founders fail it, and the objection the listener says (or thinks) when they do.

Understand

Where does the thing fit, who is it for, and why does it exist? She was blunt that many founders fail here without realising, because they know their own product so well that they can no longer hear how it sounds to a stranger. Her test was simple: keep it simple enough that a child in grade five could follow it.

The illustrative example in her deck is one every AI founder should tape to their monitor. "An AI-native platform" gives the listener almost no context. A useful explanation shows the workflow, who uses it, what it completes, and where human review remains necessary. That last part matters more than founders think. Saying where a human stays in the loop is not a weakness. It is what lets a sceptical listener picture the thing actually working in their world.

Care

Why should this matter to me? She played someone running businesses in real estate, media and fintech and asked: how does your AI model solve my problem? Or picture a woman on the street who asks what you do. How you say it decides whether she repeats it to five other people. Messaging is not about being impressive. It is about being repeatable. "Save time" and "improve outcomes" fail here, because everyone says that.

Believe

What makes the claim credible? She praised one of the cohort's defence-tech pitches from earlier in the programme because it "connected all the dots" and made the result tangible. She contrasted that with the founder who says "I am here to change the world and people should not die in wars." That, she said, makes you sound like a social worker rather than a technologist solving a tangible problem. The listener's real question is "how much works today?" Belief comes from something you can point at.

Act

What exactly do you need from the other person? Sometimes only that they believe you enough to pass the message on. With a government buyer, it is about cost, implementation and integration, and the most powerful line is that they do not have to change anything.

Her key learning for the section: "Clarity begins the conversation. Relevance and credibility move it forward."

A lot of times you cannot meet an investor with the phone in your hand on the side. You have to be impromptu. You have to believe it.

• Archana Purohit

Why she made us use pen and paper

She handed out a printed worksheet, one per startup, and asked us to fill it in by hand. The first thing she asks any startup she works with is for phones and laptops to go aside. AI tools, she argued, make simple decisions more complicated and homogenise language: you end up choosing between three jargon-heavy options instead of thinking.

Then the point that justified the exercise. By the time a pitch reaches the person who writes the cheque, it has been filtered many times over, and at that point most of the decision is instinctive. It comes down to whether the way you speak about your product stays with them after you leave. The slide is what they look at while you are in the room. The sentence is what they repeat to a partner on Monday.

The people who reach the decision maker are already the filtered lot. From there, the call is mostly instinct, and instinct remembers how you made them feel about the problem.

• Archana Purohit

The STICK formula

With the four hurdles as the goal, she gave us the preparation tool.

• S: Specific audience. Who needs to hear this? Research every attendee before a meeting; over coffee, spend the first two minutes finding out who they are.
• T: Tension. What matters to them right now? For a defence official, the fear of being unprepared. For a hospital, overload and revenue leakage.
• I: Impact. What becomes possible, or improves, because of you? One line, and it changes with the audience.
• C: Contrast. Why choose this approach and not the alternatives? Why now? This is where you layer in urgency.
• K: Known evidence. What can we substantiate? Hours saved, timelines improved, results from a pilot. Tangible, not aspirational.

The worked scenario: a logistics product

Her deck runs the whole formula on one illustrative logistics product, and seeing all five letters filled in for a single case is what made it click for me.

And the sentence that falls out of it:

We help dispatch managers identify deliveries that need attention through a prioritised view of delivery exceptions.

• Archana Purohit, worked STICK scenario

No "AI-powered", no "end-to-end". It names a person, a moment of pain and a concrete change in their morning. And her slide's footnote, that product details "require founder confirmation", is a reminder that the evidence line is only as good as what you can actually show. Her key learning: good messaging rests on clear choices about audience, value and evidence.

Find the worry behind the stated need

She illustrated tension with a story about a traditional Indian defence manufacturer, known for conventional equipment, that the government asked to build drone capability. The government's logic was about trust: we already work with them, so why bet on someone new? The tension was not "do we need drones". It was "who can we rely on". That reframing, finding the actual worry behind the stated need, is the heart of the T.

Make the tension physical

For a sales-intelligence team, she worked it out loud. If a rep logs in at ten and the day's calls and emails are already sequenced, "all that person has to do is call, call, call, update, update, update." You are removing decision fatigue from a whole team. A good tension names a moment in the listener's day, the way "problems surface after customers complain" does for the dispatch manager.

Message architecture: one consistent core

The most useful ten minutes of the morning came when she asked for a volunteer, and Piyush read out our statement. It tried to say, in one breath, that we reduce doctors' workload, optimise hospital workflows and improve patient outcomes. She asked: so what is the impact here? Piyush repeated the three parts. And that, she said, was exactly the problem. We had clubbed three audiences into one sentence. "So you have a bad statement," she said, and the room laughed, and so did we, because she was right.

When there are multiple stakeholders, the investor's immediate question is: who is going to pay for this? And the instant fear is that adoption becomes harder, because you have to convince three times instead of once.

• Archana Purohit

What stays, what adapts

Her deck gives the fix a name: message architecture, "a consistent core, adapted to each audience".

• Keep consistent: what you build, the problem you address, what works today, and the evidence behind your claims.
• Adapt: the opening, the benefit you emphasise, the level of detail, and the next step.

In the room she put it as an analogy. Your consistent core is who you are as a person. You dress differently for a party, a family puja, a wedding or a date, but you are the same person. (She teased the founders who wear the same black T-shirt and blue jeans everywhere.)

One capability, four evaluations

The deck illustrates this with a physical AI capability and the four people who evaluate it, each asking a different question:

• Operator: How does this affect my work?
• Technical evaluator: Under what conditions does it perform?
• Buyer: What does adoption require?
• Potential employee: What would I help build?

Four questions, one set of facts, four starting points. Her key learning: "Build one shared core message, then create versions for specific decisions."

When we redid ours, the user opening became about time, the buyer's about revenue and leakage, the investor's about adoption and scale. And the technical detail founders love is almost never what an investor wants first.

Interrogate your own sentence

She took our statement apart with three questions, and they work on any multi-sided product:

1. Who pays, and why? Name the payer and the tangible benefit to them, in their language (usually money, risk or time).
2. Why would the user agree? What does the person who actually touches the product get, in their day?
3. Would the least likely adopter use it? Picture the most set-in-their-ways person in the user group. What makes it easy for them?

For defence she drew the same shape: a bureaucratic layer, an investor layer, an operational layer and the end user. Four layers, four packets of content.

Credentials belong in a tagline, not a slide

Founders love an early team slide. She agreed that credentials matter but disagreed with the format. Put them in the mission line, something like built from within the system, and say them aloud when you introduce yourselves. Do not spend an early slide on the team, because attention decays from the first minute, and credibility that takes a whole slide can read as vanity. When someone in the room argued for the team slide, her reply was short: "See, that's in your mind. That's not in the investor's mind."

Customer messaging: users, buyers and evaluators

The next section of the deck splits "the customer" into three people, because in most B2B sales they are three different people with three different fears.

In the room she added the human texture. The user is where the strongest first resistance comes from ("I don't want to log in. I don't want to download another app"). The evaluator asks whether it plugs into what they have. The buyer asks about investment, time to returns, transition and learning costs, and the one founders forget: what is the exit cost if it fails? Anyone who has left a CRM after five years knows how brutal that is, and buyers are quietly pricing the cost of leaving you before they sign.

The adoption question

Underneath all three roles sits what her deck calls the adoption question, four worries that every customer has whether or not they say them aloud:

1. Will my team need training?
2. Does it fit our workflow?
3. What must we change?
4. What happens when something goes wrong?

Her key learning: "Explain the outcome and the path to using it." Most pitches explain the outcome and skip the path.

Lead with "you don't have to change anything"

Her ideal answer to "what must we change?" was "nothing". "What system are you using? We'll build a plugin for this. Nothing will change." A new system means new data management, new training and a workflow redesign. If you can remove all three, say so first.

Say what happens when it goes wrong

In high-risk sectors (health, finance, safety) a buyer needs the failure rate, the success rate and the next step when it does not work. Leaving it out makes you look like you have not thought about it. And make the product visible: a photo of it in use, in its real setting, answers five questions before anyone asks them.

Recruitment messaging: the audience founders forget

"The part that we all miss." Every person you hire becomes a spokesperson. They go home and tell ten family members what they do. Her deck frames recruitment messaging as four questions a candidate needs answered:

• Why this problem?
• Why this team?
• Why this role?
• Why now?

In the room she was blunt: people who join early startups are either looking for a cause or not getting a job elsewhere. Attract the first kind by being brutally honest from day one about the problem, why you need a team now, how messy the role may be, and what is in it for them. And stop posting AI-generated job descriptions. The deck's hiring template:

We are building [capability] for [operating environment]. This role owns [specific technical responsibility], from testing through field feedback. Our current milestone is [verified milestone]. The next challenge is [specific problem].

The line from the slide I keep coming back to: "A candidate needs to imagine the future you are building and their Monday morning inside the company." Her key learning: "Make the mission tangible through the role."

The investment case: messaging to investors

For investors, her deck starts with a line that corrects a common mistake: customer value starts the story. Before market size, before the model, the investor needs to see why a customer would want this. Then come the five things she called non-negotiable, and she said everything else is decoration:

1. Market opportunity. The size of the pool. It fits on one slide.
2. Business model. Where the money comes from. "Nothing works beyond that."
3. Evidence of demand. MVPs, pilots, paying users.
4. Ability to scale. How much you can absorb, and where your ask is embedded.
5. Milestones and what the capital funds. What the money is for, and where the last dollar is spent.

Evidence depends on your stage

The deck applies the investment case to three kinds of cohort startup, and the lesson is that "evidence of demand" means something different at each stage. I have kept them generic:

• A deep-tech company at MVP: show the first commercial application, the capability you have demonstrated, and the next risk you need to retire.
• A community-commerce company at MVP: show who participates, why they return, and how the transactions support a business.
• A cyber-security SaaS company in growth: show the buyer, paid use, and renewal or expansion evidence, where available.

The deep-tech founder should not pretend to have renewal data. The SaaS founder should not hide behind "demonstrated capability". Each should lead with the evidence that is honest for their stage.

The one-paragraph investment case

Then the template, which I think is the most useful single artefact in the whole deck:

[Customer] faces [problem]. We provide [solution]. Evidence: [verified progress]. Revenue: [model]. Next milestone: [milestone]. Capital funds: [work].

Seven slots. If you cannot fill one honestly, that is the conversation you are not ready for yet. Her key learning: "Connect the product story to commercial logic and execution."

In the room she added: tell investors why you need them specifically (money, network, or a capability you cannot build alone). And treat the deck as a high-hygiene document. Do not send it left, right and centre; keep one version for investors and one for a customer's decision maker.

Layer your revenue

To a founder building a hyperlocal group-buying platform with a take-rate model, her advice travels well: a single small commission is a weak anchor for an investor. Add layers over time (free for a year, then a premium membership like the food-delivery "prime" plans, then merchant registration fees). Once users pay a membership, they route more transactions through you. And you do not have to announce every layer to users; they live in your evidence for investors.

The stranger payment test

Then the MVP test she proposed, which I copied word for word into my notebook. Go to your heaviest users and ask them to pay ₹500 a year for a small discount on every transaction. If five out of ten strangers pay, you have a conversion story to take to investors. Zero cost, very little effort.

Her words: "Don't go to your friends. Go to complete strangers. If your top ten users are your friends, go to the next ten. You have to be honest with yourself."

Stop explaining the product

A media-infrastructure founder tried the audience exercise and explained how the product works, layer by layer. She stopped him. Speaking as the owner of a media business with an old archive, she asked, "Why would I add another tech product when we already have a system and an SOP in place?" When he reframed around what his team had learned producing video themselves, that generation is only one part and managing the output is the real pain, she said: "You should have started like that." The story of how you discovered the pain beats the architecture of the fix.

Beware of projecting, and pick three pilots

She warned against projecting: solving your own vanity problem and assuming others share it. "If I am overweight and I run ten kilometres, how is it improving the world around me?" And to a deep-tech founder whose technology could serve a hundred sectors: the moment you say ten sectors, the investor tunes out. Pick three pilots, succeed, and do not start a fourth, even when "you have four babies and you love them all equally."

Institutional messaging: government and large partners

Several startups in the cohort sell, or hope to sell, to government bodies and large institutions. Her deck gives them their own four-part frame:

1. Mandate fit. Why is this relevant to their responsibility? An official engages with what their department is accountable for, not with what is exciting.
2. Readiness. What can you demonstrate today?
3. Feasibility. What would evaluation or adoption involve?
4. Specific request. What decision are you asking for?

The illustrative outreach note is worth copying almost verbatim:

We are developing [capability] relevant to [operational need]. We have demonstrated [result] under [conditions]. We propose a scoped evaluation with agreed success criteria. We would like to understand the appropriate evaluation route and responsible team.

Look at how modest the ask is. Not "please buy", not even "please pilot", but "help us find the right route and the right team". That is a request a busy official can actually say yes to.

What a scoped pilot needs

Her slide lists four things a scoped pilot must have, and in the room she spelled out why:

• A defined problem and users.
• Scope, duration and responsibilities.
• Success criteria and boundaries.
• Approvals, support and data needs.

Otherwise, she warned, you end up with a pilot on paper and nothing actionable, sitting in a room while half the time passes. Her key learning: "Institutional messaging needs relevance, precision and a workable next step."

Website flow: the site as a guided decision

The last big section was on websites, which she called the most neglected asset. "Do you know what an investor does at night? Checks your landing page." Her deck treats a website as a guided decision, a sequence that follows the visitor's own questions.

The page sections map onto those questions:

1. Opening: audience, offer and value, so visitors feel recognised immediately.
2. Use case: recognition and relevance. Real use cases, maximum three; or one strong case shown through the user, the manager who bought it and the end customer who benefits.
3. Demonstration: how the offer works.
4. Meaningful difference: why consider this approach.
5. Evidence: support for the promise.
6. Adoption questions: effort, fit and uncertainty.
7. Next step: a clear action.

Team goes toward the end. Two slide notes generalise: make it obvious whether you sell a service, software or something else, and give each distinct participant group its own clear route. Her key learning: "Website flow should follow the customer's understanding."

Website copy: from broad to concrete

The next slide shows what copy looks like when each piece has one job, using the same logistics example as the STICK scenario:

• Headline: "Know which deliveries need attention."
• Subhead: "A delivery-exception dashboard for dispatch teams managing daily operations."
• Demonstration: show one real exception and how the team handles it.
• Proof: add a verified result, with scope.
• Call to action: "See the dispatch workflow."

Then the table that I think every founder should run their homepage through. It takes the four phrases that appear on half the startup sites in the world and replaces each with an instruction.

Her key learning: let each piece of copy perform a clear job. She shared prompts to audit existing site copy against the framework, with a warning: if the tool throws jargon back at you, simplify it again.

From a paragraph to two words

Then the story I think will stay with me longest. At a company she worked with through its pre-IPO and IPO marketing, the original mission statement was a long sentence about helping businesses and employees reduce expenses and taxes by structuring HR benefits into salaries. Over a year of rewrites it became "business spends simplified". Later, after she had left, she saw the even tighter version: spends simplified. Employee benefits, reimbursements, all of it, are spends. Two words.

Keep cutting your statement down, and down, and down, to the last mile, until anyone and everyone can understand it.

• Archana Purohit

She asked each of us to have a three-word version: the walking-on-the-street version.

The live adaptation clinic

The practice section of her deck is a clinic format any team can run on itself: one startup, two audiences. You keep the product truth fixed and change everything around it.

Four questions drive it: What stays true? What moves to the opening? What evidence matters? What next step fits? The format is six minutes per volunteer: confirm the product and evidence, hear the current message, choose two audiences, rewrite each opening, and explain the change. The pairings her deck suggested for the cohort were customer and employee, user and investor, evaluator and institution, and two different participant groups on the same platform.

Her key learning is the one I underlined twice: "Adaptation is a strategic choice before it becomes a writing task." You cannot write your way out of not knowing who you are talking to.

A message that travels, and how to test it

Her close brings the whole deck into four pieces: one clear core, relevant audience versions, evidence behind the promise, and a useful next step. Then three questions to test any message on a real person:

1. "What do you think we do?"
2. "Why would this matter to you?"
3. "What would you need to know next?"

Where their answers drift from yours tells you which of the four hurdles your message is failing.

Your message will travel into rooms you are not in.

• Archana Purohit, Messaging Masterclass

A customer explains it to a colleague, a candidate to their family, an investor to a partner, an official forwards your note to another team. "Give them something accurate, relevant and easy to carry forward." Her final key learning: help the next person understand the business and make an informed decision.

What investors look for: Aaliyah's Q&A

In the evening Aaliyah from Draper arrived, having landed in Hyderabad in the small hours and already been driven around the city and to state government buildings. She was clearly tired and still completely present. She took questions from the room before the pitches.

Trends are a signal, not a requirement

Asked what Silicon Valley wants next, she listed trends (space, hardware, deep tech, and now AI combined with deep tech; a few years ago crypto, then AI) and then said trending is not a requirement. A big market plus deep understanding of the problem makes even an unfashionable sector investable. What you see on X does not matter that much.

When to pivot: conviction is not blindness

Draper says "be a cockroach": do not die, do whatever it takes. The other school says iterate fast and listen to customers. Her answer: it depends on whether you still have conviction that the problem is worth solving. If yes, keep exploring until the answer becomes no. But conviction does not mean being blind. Watch new competitors and tools; accept that it may not be a venture-scale problem; and remember that if you are the only company doing something, it is often because others tried and it did not work. Pivot every time something fails, though, and you will never do anything meaningful.

What Draper looks for in founders

She said it is probably similar to other investors, and then was refreshingly honest:

• Synergy and trust. Most of the time, a VC who passes on you simply did not like you, and will not say so. The relationship with an early investor lasts longer than the average American marriage, so vet your VCs too, including Draper. She needs to trust that you will do what you say and genuinely care about returning money.
• You know your market better than they do. Make them comfortable that you understand it, and they do not need every detail.
• Do your homework. Pitch a gaming company to a fund that does not do gaming, or not at your stage, and it is an instant pass.

Put the first point next to Archana's lesson about instinct and a lot of polite passes make sense. You cannot fully control whether the relationship feels right, but you can control your homework and the clarity of your message.

Discomfort is a trainable skill

Aaliyah had heard about Survival Day and wanted to know what it was: start from a single toilet roll, trade up, and earn your own lunch. The stories came tumbling out. One team wrote names on cups at a coffee shop and drove a burst of sales for the store in an hour. Another sold outside sports and lifestyle stores. One ended up at the airport. On our team, someone with nothing else to trade took a trinket off his keychain for a water bottle. On paper it had no value. The conversations that came out of the afternoon did.

She said she was taking the format back to Draper's Silicon Valley cohort, where founders sell condoms on the street on day one ("Condoms are easy, but they're uncomfortable"). The ethos comes straight from Tim Draper: being uncomfortable is incredibly important.

The more you get out of your comfort zone, even in very little ways, the easier it is to go and get a few pilots with a doctor, and then maybe be rejected, and be okay with that.

• Aaliyah, Draper

It gets harder to leave your comfort zone the longer you stay in it. Rejection tolerance is a muscle, and small reps (a cold message, a demo to someone who might say no) keep it from wasting away.

The one-minute pitch, and what it exposes

Then the pitches. It was late, some of us were yawning, and she laid down a format: one minute, standing up, "put your energy, your heart into this." Four things only.

She gave only light feedback that night and saved the deeper work for one-on-ones the next day. I will not record anyone's numbers here, but the feedback patterns were so consistent that they work as rules for any founder. Watching them, I kept mapping each one back to Archana's four hurdles.

Anchor a big vision in today (Believe)

A team building glasses that read brain and eye signals got an honest first reaction: this sounds like Black Mirror, and it feels far away. Her advice was not to shrink the vision but to anchor it in where the technology is today, including the published research. When they mentioned a recent paper, her posture changed: "Okay, now we're getting to that."

A strong problem earns the money question (Act)

A defence-tech founder opened with the brutal cost asymmetry between a cheap attacking drone and the very expensive missile used to intercept it. A vivid opening. Aaliyah's concern was the next step: distribution, and who actually pays. A strong problem opening earns you the question "how will you make money?", so have that answer ready immediately after.

Small revenue? Lead with customers

A legal-tech founder working on India's case backlog mentioned early revenue. Aaliyah's advice was simple and widely useful: if your revenue is still small, lead with the customer count, not the revenue figure. Traction can look like many things.

Defensibility is not "our product is better"

Asked about defensibility, a founder building governance for AI agents offered pedigree and product quality. Neither works: big companies have better pedigrees and more resources. What you need is clear positioning and conviction about why they will not eat you, even when they could.

Kill the category one-liner (Understand)

A founder building on-device AI for a wearable drew the most attention of the night, because he had real validation. "Less about the money, more about the validation," she said. Her one pointer: do not open with a category label that has become a whole vertical. The media-infrastructure founder from the morning heard, kindly, "I don't actually get what you're doing." When he said "a context graph for media" instead, she said, "I got it." It was the "AI-native platform" slide from the morning, happening live.

Say "paid pilots" only when they are paid

When Piyush pitched for us, Aaliyah asked whether our pilots were free. Her advice to the room: if they're not paid, just say pilots; if they are, say "paid pilots". Investors hear the difference, and precision builds trust. It is Archana's "known evidence" rule in another voice.

She also pointed out, correctly, that we went well over time. In a one-minute round. Guilty.

Know why others failed

The question she flagged for our one-to-one applies to any crowded space: many startups have attempted this problem elsewhere, and few achieved real adoption. Why not, and what will you do differently, down to how you run pilots?

Apply it to your startup

• Write your consistent core first. What you build, the problem, what works today, the evidence.
• List every audience (user, evaluator, buyer, investor, hire, institution) and run STICK for each.
• Answer the adoption question. If "nothing changes" is true, lead with it.
• Fill the seven-slot investment case and the four-question hiring message. Leave a slot blank rather than inflate it.
• Walk your homepage through the five visitor questions.
• Prepare the follow-ups: who pays, why a bigger company will not eat you, why others failed, what is paid and what is not.

When we did this on our own pitch, the change was mostly subtraction: fewer audiences per sentence, fewer technical details up front, one line of credentials instead of a slide.

Resources from the day

• Deck: "Messaging Masterclass: Say it so it sticks" by Archana Purohit (archanapurohit.in), twelve sections, all covered above.
• Frameworks: Understand, Care, Believe, Act; STICK; keep consistent versus adapt; the adoption question; the seven-slot investment case; mandate fit, readiness, feasibility, specific request; the five visitor questions; broad-to-concrete copy; the three message-test questions; the one-minute pitch (problem, solution, market, one hook).
• Exercises: the pen-and-paper messaging worksheet; the three-word statement; the stranger payment test.
• People who taught: Archana Purohit (three-time founder, business coach, fractional CMO, author); P.N.S. Murthy (former Head of Values, GMR Group); Aaliyah (Draper); SK (Draper University India). Tim Draper's "be uncomfortable" ethos, via Aaliyah.
• Tools mentioned: AI assistants for auditing site copy (then simplify what they return); each VC's website and portfolio page for pre-pitch research.

What to take away

• One business, many audiences: a reason to use it, to build it, to back it, to engage.
• Every message must clear four hurdles in order: understand, care, believe, act.
• Write the audience first; tension, impact, contrast and evidence follow from it.
• Keep one consistent core and adapt only the opening, benefit, detail and next step. Never pitch several stakeholders in one sentence.
• Every customer is asking the adoption question: training, fit, change, and what happens when it goes wrong.
• Candidates need to picture your future and their Monday morning.
• Investors want customer value first, then market, model, demand, scale, milestones and what the capital funds.
• Institutions want mandate fit, readiness, feasibility and a specific, modest request.
• Replace every broad phrase with the concrete task, decision, step or effort it stands for.
• Test willingness to pay with strangers. Conviction does not mean being blind. Discomfort is a muscle.
• Your message will travel into rooms you are not in. Make it easy to carry.

Try this

1. Score your one-liner on the four hurdles. Grade your current statement against Understand, Care, Believe and Act. For each, write the objection a stranger would raise ("What would I use this for?", "Everyone says that", "How much works today?", "What do you want from me?").

2. Fill a STICK grid by hand. Put your audiences across the top (user, buyer, evaluator, investor, candidate) and S, T, I, C, K down the side. Fill every cell with a pen, no laptop. Circle what stays the same across all columns. That is your consistent core. Then write one sentence per column in the shape of the dispatch-manager line.

3. Write your seven-slot investment case. Customer, problem, solution, evidence, revenue, next milestone, what the capital funds. Any slot you cannot fill honestly is your homework for the month.

4. Run the adaptation clinic on yourself. Pick two audiences. Give yourself six minutes: confirm the product truth, write the current message, then rewrite the opening, the proof and the ask for each. Explain the change to a teammate.

5. Run the message test on three real people. Ask "What do you think we do?", "Why would this matter to you?" and "What would you need to know next?". Write their answers down word for word. Where they diverge from yours is where to work.

6. Cut to three words, then pitch in sixty seconds. Halve your statement until you have a walking-on-the-street version. Then set a timer and pitch: problem, solution, market, one hook. If you go over, cut the part where you explain how the product works. (We are still practising this one.)