Using a story is a good idea. We get to the problem early and understand it pretty clearly. It also gives you the potential to talk about other elements in your pitch (competition, business model) from the perspective of your customer.
This is important because it creates a unity – a clear storyline – that links the parts. If you don’t have this, you often end up with a list: here’s the business model; here’s the market; here’s the competition … .
I see this a lot. During the pitch each individual element can seem reasonably clear, but after the pitch I remember almost nothing. Nothing sticks because all the elements are all in the same format, and that format is the same as every other pitch.
So we need to create that unified flow. A story helps you to do exactly that and to avoid a presentation that just becomes a list. As the linguist Earl Stevick said,
“If you want to forget something, put it in a list.”
