Editor’s note: Nick Gonzales is a web entrepreneur and former journalist for TechCrunch. Nick has seen the PR business from both sides; first while at TechCrunch and later working with Covered Co., a Silicon Valley PR/Marketing agency that has worked with companies like Dropbox, WhatsApp and Secure.me. Nick currently resides in Dubai, where he co-founded Nervora, which represents MENA region ad sales for the world’s leading publishing brands including Conde Nast, CBSi, Hearst, Gawker Media, and more. He can be found on LinkedIn.

There are two kinds of stories: great ones and the ones that have to be pitched. This article isn’t about great stories.

I have a lot of fond memories from TechCrunch — being there when the YouTube acquisition broke, covering the rise of Y Combinator, and generally speaking to people a recent college grad had no right chatting with, let alone interrogating about their company. However, getting pitched wasn’t one of them.

Pitching the press is a lot like trying to close any other business deal — sans the excitement of any money changing hands. In fact, “selling” a pitch means creating more work for the writer, who has to dig into the details of your pitch and craft a story.

That being said, let me help the inquisitive PR professional or budding startup CEO with some perspective on how to help the stories that need to be pitched make it through the process.

Know the Type of Story

Before you even bother picking up the phone, know what kind of story you’re pitching. While creativity makes a story interesting, most follow a pretty standard template. There are financing stories (Company X raised Y from Z), traction updates (X is growing like a week), product launches (X wants to be the Y of Z), the counterfactual (you’d think X, but really it’s Y), wow numbers (Did you know that X,XXX,XXX do Y?), and many more. Notice the patterns. Be the patterns or break them with a thoughtful opinion piece.

Be genuine

I always preferred talking to founders over their PR handlers. They could not only answer the questions more completely, but also conveyed a real excitement about what they were doing. Also, founders garner a lot more empathy because not so secretly everyone writing at a tech blog wants to be them (Paul Carr, Ben Parr, Eric Eldon, need I go on…). If you’re not a founder, you’ll need to figure out how to get a lot nerdier quickly and network with all those wanna-be founder writers.

Know Your Writer

Each writer has their own perspective and style. Get to know them and it will help guide who to approach and how. Follow up with writers that covered similar companies. Share an intelligent perspective based on their previous stories. In other words, don’t pitch MG on anything other than Apple.

Find Free Cycles

TechCrunch now has a lot of writers. You may want your story to be written by one of them in particular, but you’d be better served by realizing they all reach millions of readers each month. Mostly likely the top writers are busy on pressing stories or pet projects, so you could do yourself a solid by reaching out down the lineup to find someone with some free time, the kind of free time that can be spent vetting your story to write-up themselves or pass on to someone covering your beat.

Writers are Lazy

It may not be so much that writers are lazy, as they are pressed for time and starved for the kind of attention that only writing yet another story about the Facebook acquisition of Instagram can sate. But what I really mean is that writers are the curators of interestingness. News is by definition what is now novel. You make your story infinitely easier to get picked up by doing some of the heavy lifting and placing it in an interesting package. Story vehicles like industry studies and info graphics educate while letting the writer take care of the rest of the exposition.

Exist

At the end of the day, it’s all about trusted relationships. By staying in the industry, your longevity lends some credibility to your competence and ideally more solid connections. If you know a writer well, it’s not a guarantee of a story, but it’s the best shot at getting written up. Also keep in mind that it’s a small industry. So try not to be this guy.

It's probably no surprise that human speakers with a deeper voice are typically seen as more powerful, but a new study in Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests lowering your pitch also increases how you perceive yourself and makes you feel more powerful. More »

This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com.

When raising capital, a combination of your company’s product, vision, team and execution are what ultimately attract investment. And while the pitch deck is ultimately less important than vision and product, it exists to convey both elements and get investors hungry for more.

Like other investors, I come across hundreds of pitches each month — some in person, others in email; some as PowerPoints, and others as full-fledged business plans. Your goal is to craft a deck that is both:

- crisp: succinct enough that it is easily digestible (in person, email, etc)

- and complete: thorough enough that it conveys the big vision and current traction

I looked back on many of the pitches I reviewed over the last couple years (good and bad) and compared it to public pitch decks of familiar, successful companies like Airbnb, Foursquare, and Mint. The output is this guide to creating an early-stage pitch deck. It’s intended for companies seeking seed and series A investments.

There are five core themes followed by a suggested structure:

1. Have a great one-liner
2. Know your audience
3. Keep it to 10-15 slides
4. Beware of the demo
5. Expect the deck to be shared

And remember: it’s the story and the conversation that is important – not the imagery and colors. If you can convey the passion that drives you (and your users / customers!), you will have created a powerful pitch deck.

In order to get startups and entrepreneurs thinking about the most effective ways to pitch their businesses, Adeo Ressi of Founder Institute has been encouraging his founders to boil their mission statements down to one sentence, using a simple formula. George Zachary of Charles River Ventures asked Ressi to come up with a format for startup pitches, because he has been hearing so many different people pitching in umpteen different ways. Tech bloggers, investors, partners, founders, and many in between are intimately familiar with this: The seemingly infinite permutations entrepreneurs have devised for their pitches. Some work, and many don’t.

Robin’s post yesterday covered Ressi’s formula in detail, and he even encouraged entrepreneurs to send us their one sentence pitches. And that they have. (More to come on that.)

Now, I happen to agree with both Adeo and Robin: Whittling pitches down to a bite-sized chunks can be a great exercise for founders. Entrepreneurs, whether first-timers or not, can always stand to improve the ways in which they describe their company. Time is money, and the more quickly and effectively you can pitch your business, the better your chances of grabbing the attention of investors, bloggers, partners, etc.

Of course, one sentence pitches should be an exercise to get you articulating what your business really does well — better than everyone else — but not the end game. One sentence descriptions can result in vagueness, hyperbole, and buzzword orgies.

Encouraging more effective expression in mission statements is a good thing, but spewing forth a string of meaningless signifiers and buzzwords? Nope. That will just cause us to go on screensaver, or call security. There’s a fine line. Grooveshark for hugs? Stop it.

So, here we have the flip side of the coin, the devil’s advocate — some terrific examples of what can happen when the one-sentence pitch goes too far. Stay away from these, and you’re off on the right foot. For starters, there’s Now That’s What I Call Startups, developed by Reuben Pressman and Hunter Payne to assist founders in eliminating the “low hanging fruit” during the ideating process. Does your pitch sound eerily similar? Then it might be time to consider a pivot.

Now That’s What I Call Startups joins other startup generators, like It’s This For That, which highlights the annoyingly familiar habit (of which we’re all guilty) of drawing crappy ad hoc analogies when describing startups. It’s the “Airbnb for X” problem. The analogy can work, but only sparingly, and it better be extremely accurate.

For good measure, there’s also Startup Idea Generator, and Smore’s awesome Y Combinator parody, Y Kombinator, which generates landing pages for startups that are obviously immune from the deadpool.

Or, perhaps you’re a coder who happens to be short on ideas, in which case you should check out Justin Windle’s hilarious mashup for technical projects created using the WTF Engine. So, put on a pot of tea, and get coding.

Refining your pitch until it sings is an essential process, and some of these sites will no doubt help to get your juices flowing. But for the love of all that’s holy, be careful. You don’t want to become these guys. (We’re looking at you, product people.)

Courtesy of FI, here are some actual pitch resources for startups.

If you had to describe your company’s mission in a single sentence, what would your pitch read or sound like? One good way to summarize what you do and boil it down to one clear sentence, in my opinion, is following the advice of Founder Institute founder Adeo Ressi (see above).

This is how it’s done: “my company, _(insert name of company)_, is developing _(a defined offering)_ to help _(a defined audience)_ _(solve a problem)_ with _(secret sauce)_”.

Simple, right? In your dreams. Now, I know that the sentence above is somewhat vague (and I also realize that we’ve posted Ressi’s advice over a year ago already) but it’s spot-on, and even just thinking about this is a very useful exercise. In the short video below, you can watch Ressi talk more about his proposed one-sentence pitch setup along with some concrete examples.

I’ve seen the man explain the importance of writing, refining and delivering the one-sentence pitch to a group of aspiring startup founders just a few months ago, and I thought it was great (and amusing to see even experienced entrepreneurs struggling with this). It’s way more difficult than you’d think.

So, startup founders, watch the video below, think about it carefully, and give us your best one-sentence pitch in the comments of this post. If you can’t or won’t use our comment section, feel free to email us at tips@techcrunch.com, but please stick to one sentence.

I asked Ressi if he wanted to help judge the entries and jump into the comment section to voice his opinion on pitches, and he agreed, so we’ll both be looking at your submissions attentively.

The best one-sentence pitches get featured in a separate post on the first day of next year.

Inspired by: Inside FI: Our Favorite #Startup VC Pitching Resources (must-click)

This guest post is written by David Cowan, who joined Bessemer Venture Partners in 1992. He has since made 45 early-stage investments for Bessemer, including 19 that have gone public, and 18 that have been acquired by public companies.

Over the years I’ve heard many legitimate gripes from entrepreneurs about the way venture capital firms treat them while fundraising. I must confess an imperfect record of courtesy myself, though I do try to be respectful, and to incorporate feedback. For example, I once resolved never to keep entrepreneurs waiting long for me in our lobby, and I think I live up to that.

But I often hear one particular gripe from those who simply fail to think through the issue practically: For their first pitch to a large venture capital firm, entrepreneurs are often invited to speak or meet with someone other than a partner of the firm. Some interpret this as an insult, a waste of time, and a lack of substantive interest in their startups. And they are partially right.

They are right that in any first meeting or conversation, the VC is less interested than the entrepreneur. Not zero interest, but less. This is true for every pitch meeting that has ever taken place in history. In the second meeting there is more interest, and by the time a venture investor wires the money, the firm is just as excited as the founders.

They are wrong, though, about the insult. And the numbers prove incontrovertibly that it is not a waste of time.

The experienced partner you want as a lead investor probably has a lot of board seats. He or she spends most of the day at company meetings (board and otherwise), in interviews, and with the limited partners who actually provide the capital. I, for one, always try to reserve time in my week for hearing pitches, but it is scarce, and so if I took every first meeting myself, I’d be much less likely to actually meet the entrepreneur whose startup I wish to fund.

Also, as a seasoned VC I’m a lot dumber now about new markets than 15 years ago when I had fewer obligations. Researching all thewild tangents and nuances of cloud infrastructure, cyber security, social commerce, scalable data processing, etc., is a full time job. Who Has Time For This? Not I, but I can hire people smarter than me who do!

So if you’re an entrepreneur interested in partnering with a smart, successful, well capitalized venture investor, you have many aspects of character, competency and chemistry to consider. Is the audience’s seniority at your first pitch really the most important?

Think it through before you snub a meeting with that associate, analyst, principal or vice-president. That’s who’s most likely to get what you’re doing, and to be your champion through the process. (Indeed, the last five investments I made arose from first meetings that the founders had with our VPs James Cham, Trevor Oelschig or Ethan Kurzweil.) Consider it an opportunity to scope out the firm and to polish your pitch before you meet the partners.

And please understand that the intention is most definitely not an insult. Anyone in our orbit knows that many VCs fully appreciate the talent, courage, energy and genius of the entrepreneurs we meet. It is only because we wish to meet more of you that we have the process and organization that we do.

Now I’ve got to get going——the two engineers whom Sunil met on Thursday just showed up in my lobby.

So you think you have what it takes to build a ground breaking app that will change the world? Do you have what it takes to accomplish that in just a little under 24 hours? Starting yesterday, 500 hackers and the like spent 24 hours on Pizza, Pop Chips and Red Bull trying to come up with the next big thing, or at least something that people want. The competition was rough, and the pitch format was brutal, as you had to explain your idea in just under 60 seconds.

Not everyone made the cut, and in the end there could be only four (six if you count the honorable mentions).  So congrats to Gilt-ii, Docracy, Doach, Dispatch IO  and JoystiCC and Venture Crapital who earned honorable mentions. We’ve posted a montage of the award winning demos above.

And in case you want to meet the teams behind the magic, we dragged their tired butts backstage post Hackathon for some face time. Here they are, in no particular order.

Doach

Venture Crapital

JoyStiCC

Docracy

Gilt-ii

Dispatch.io

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Eric Savitz writes about the many, many positive effects of smiling, and how smiling works. It's a good read for anyone considering a presentation, an international trip, a pitch meeting, or just a change in their mood. [Forbes] More »

When it comes to broadband speeds, ISPs have a sales pitch, and you have Speedtest.net. Want a real-world test of actual bandwidth? Netflix has released how fast they can deliver HD streams to customers on each U.S. and Canadian ISP. UPDATE. More »