Business Overview
The business overview should summarize what you do uniquely well for whom and how. Keep it short and sweet. Provide context and orient your audience to what is about to follow—get your audience wanting to learn more.
We recommend you start by refining your 
Customer Value Proposition which will result in the below, and then refine it to fit in with the storyline of your pitch
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
Now the biggest mistake I see companies make is they go straight into pitching about what their problem is, what their solution is, what their product is, or what their service is. And I highly recommend an orientation first.
Let me tell you my story on this picture. I walked into one of these towers, the watchtowers that are all the way along the Great Wall. Now you know where I am. I walked into this room and I was totally disoriented, because the shadow is at literally right angles to where the window is. It took me a while to figure out what I was looking at, and then I went around the corner and saw the window. That’s literally what I feel like a lot of times when entrepreneurs start pitching us before they’ve even told us what the background is to their idea or what the market opportunity is.
Startup Secret: Orient your audience with a single-line statement. Right away, just put up a single-line statement:
We do XX for Y by uniquely ZZ.
Using Apperian as an example: “We do mobile application management for large enterprises by connecting to the cloud and deploying applications on devices.” It might be as simple as that. Now, that’s not going to compel anybody to suddenly invest in you, but it’s going to orient them.
When we get to positioning in the go-to-market class, you’ll see we make this framework more explicit about what you do uniquely well, how you do it, and why it’s positioning you for success. But at the start of the pitch, this is just an orientation. We had a pitch competition with the Harvard group last year, and even after people had heard this, we got the feedback that they went straight into their pitch too often without orienting people. Those that did a good job with the orientation got a lot more buy-in early on.