Project 5: Final

This project assignment is worth 2000 points.

This homework is to be done as a team.

P5 Pitch Deck is due on Gradescope, Sunday May 3, 2026 11:59pm.

P5 Pitch will be at the final, Monday, May 4, 2026 5:30pm-8:30pm GHC 4307.

Submission

Submit P5 as a PDF file to Gradescope.

If you prepare the response in some other software (like Tex), please export as PDF before submitting. Include your name and Andrew ID at the top of the document.

Learning Goals

• Learn how to prepare for a free-ranging pitch/discussion with an investor.
• Learn how to provide enough information to the investors to close the deal.

1. Project Context

This is it, the moment you have been waiting for. Are you ready to become a unicorn startup? This is your chance to put all the chips on the table and win the VC jackpot.

As introduced at the beginning of this semester, your product must solve a civic-minded problem that improves life in your city. However, for this special presentation, we relax a constraint: In this pitch, you may expand beyond Pittsburgh to target 2 additional markets. These may be other cities, locales, or market domains. For example, you can expand from Pittsburgh to Columbus, OH, from restaurants to caterers, from selling to Microsoft to selling to Apple, Google, and Meta. Note: you may not simply expand to all people in the USA or all people in the world. Those markets are still way too big for a seed-stage startup to target.

We have learned that pitches to investors look a bit different than your typical CMU presentation. Instead of talking in front of a slide deck that contains everything you want to say, a real investor pitch splits your content in two.

1. A pitch deck. This is a 5-page prospectus introducing the concept behind your startup, the market opportunity you are taking advantage of, the business or technical innovation you have developed, the secret sauce that explains why you're the best people to lead this effort, your plan to acquire customers and make revenue, and oh yeah, by the way, how you built your product. This pitch deck will have been emailed to the investors the night before your pitch and likely not read until just before your pitch begins.

2. A pitch presentation. This is a 15-minute presentation / discussion with investors, backed by nothing but your live demo (i.e., no slides) where you have to convince them that you are the real deal and they should invest with you. This is primarily an oral discussion; you can refer to concepts from your pitch deck, but you cannot bring them up on screen. The only thing you can and must show is your live demo to prove that your technology is real.

2. Pitch Deck (1000 points)

1. Prepare a 10-page document in Google Docs or your favorite word processor.
   1. Note: A slide presentation is not acceptable.
2. Style-wise, think business presentation. It should have flashy graphics, short bullets of text, impressive charts where the arrows always go up and to the right, etc. It should be readable at a glance by a wealthy person who is perpetually short on time, and for whom the motto "time is money" is actually true.
   1. Another style point: All graphic elements, photos, screen shots, fonts, colors, etc. should look consistent across all pages of the document. If you put in headshots, take new headshots of everyone with the same pose and same background.
   2. Do consider enrolling the help of an LLM to help style your document. However, don't let it hallucinate your content.
3. Your document must include the following elements (though definitely not in this order):
   1. Startup Info: Your startup's name, contact email address, logo, and social media account(s).
   2. Team Info: Your names, email addresses, headshot photos, and LinkedIn account URLs.
      1. All team members must have legit LinkedIn accounts filled with a completed profile and headset. This is another signal that investors look for to determine that you are real people. It will also help you get a job once you graduate CMU.
   3. Product Info: The product name, logo, and a tag line that sums up the essence of the product in 3-5 words.
      1. Seriously, don't go over 5 words.
   4. Problem Info: The problem you are solving along with a short description of your target customers.
      1. Your customers cannot be "all people." You are not Meta or Google (yet). The problem must be realistic for the targetted population.
   5. Solution Info: Your solution, derived from your value proposition. Split the value proposition up into individual, short bullets of text to make it glanceable.
   6. Evidence: 2-3 items of supporting evidence from your user discovery investigation that indicate that your solution is the right one. These must include at least one customer quote. More quotes are better.
   7. The market opportunity: Why this market? Why now? How much "opportunity" is there? Support your assertions with data from your investigations of the size of the market, the competitive landscape, the potential for growth, etc.
   8. Your business plan: How do you plan to earn money in this market? How much is possible? How big is your budget? Support your plan with evidence from your viability analysis. Use actual numbers in this plan. Do all the math for these busy investors who can't be bothered to use a calculator.
   9. Traction: How many current users do you have? Tell us about who they are, what kind of feedback you've been receiving, how much money you have made, and how quickly you've grown in Pittsburgh.
      1. If you don't have any actual customers, talk about the customers you plan to acquire.
   10. Expansion: The 2 additional markets you plan to target with your product. This is what the investor's money is for, right? Why these markets? How similar or different are they from your original customers? How do their needs and problems differ? How should your product change to address the differences?
   11. Your go-to-market strategy: How do you acquire new customers? How many do you plan to acquire in the first 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years? How much will it cost to acquire them?
   12. Team Fit: Why is your team the right one for this task? What is your secret sauce? Be careful with wording here: don't give away your actual secrets, just the idea of them.
   13. Your Product: Describe your top 3 user stories through screen shots. In line with the business style, reduce each user story down to its 1-3 word essence and find the perfect single screen shot that shows off what it is all about. Pick the 3 user stories that convinced your customers that you solved their problems. Note: do not pick your app's secure user login user story.
   14. Your competition: Who are they? Why is your solution better? What is your competitive advantage over these other companies?
       1. This could be concisely presented as a chart where your startup and product appear in the top right corner (which we all know is the best corner of any chart). That's just one idea. Please use your imagination here.
   15. Your Ask: What do you want from the investor? How much money do you need to finance your expansion? How long should the runway be? How much can you make for your investor in that time? How many customers will this enable you to acquire? How many LLM credits do you need? If there's something non-financial, this is the place to ask. For example, do you need introductions to your investors' other companies to facilitate a partnership? Do you need a company car that you can paint your logo on to advertise your product? Do you need a new lead designer?
   16. AI Use: Explain how you used GenAI/LLMs to help you design, build, and test your product. For what tasks were the LLMs helpful? harmful? frustrating? enjoyable? Name two specific, actionable ways you will use LLMs to speed up your market expansion plans.
   17. Advertising: Show a screenshot of your product web site. Include the URL in your pitch deck.
   18. Product Access: A URL to test out your app. This can be a download URL for a desktop app, a URL to a web application, a URL to an app in some app store, etc.

Remember, these sections do not need to be presented in this exact order in your pitch deck. We wrote them in as we thought of them, so they're definitely not in the best order for making your pitch.

You may use an LLM to help you craft the pitch deck.

Turn in:

1. Save your document as PDF and submit it on Gradescope.
   1. A URL to a document (i.e., Google Doc) is unacceptable for this assignment.
2. Attach LLM chat logs or shareable URLs accessible to all instructors.

3. Pitch (1000 points)

As Profs. Brown and Wahby demonstrated in class on Tuesday, April 7, a pitch is a conversation between you and your potential investor. Your goal is to sell yourself and the product, and get the investor to feel positive about your prospects by the time the pitch ends.

You must be prepared to speak about all of the content in your pitch deck without having the pitch deck on the screen to back you up.

1. The order of pitches is randomly determined.
2. Participation from all team members during the pitch is required. Absent team members will lose points individually. If you must be absent, be sure you have worked out a plan with the instructors and your team.
3. Your team will have 15 minutes to make its pitch.
4. Your investors will be introduced to you at the beginning of the final.
5. Your classmates (who are not on your team) are the investors' assistants. They will have access to your pitch decks and can provide information to the investors about details from the pitch deck that answer a question they have or to prompt the investors to ask a question.
6. Be prepared to talk for 15 minutes. However, the investors can and will interrupt you at any point to ask questions or make a statement. They will be respectful of your time, but do not be alarmed if you don't make it through your entire pitch before the 15 minutes are up.
7. Each member of the team must speak for at least 2 minutes of time. That's a minimum requirement.
8. You must use 3-5 minutes of your time to show a live demo of your product. This is the only portion of time in which you may have something on screen. This need not be a contiguous 3-5 minutes, but your demo time must be on screen for at least 3 minutes and no more than 5 minutes.
   1. Be flexible about what to show. It should be relevant to the part of the conversation that triggers you to think, "Hey, a demo would really help me to explain what I'm trying to say right now!"
   2. The demo has to look as polished as your pitch deck. If you are showing off listings that come from "sellers" or "restaurants" make these look like legit listings from real customers.
   3. If you need to log in to your app, do this before your pitch begins. Don't waste your 3-5 minutes on a login screen. If you need two accounts to show off the user story, prepare two browsers or phones already logged into the correct accounts. This isn't the 1990s. Don't try to do this all on one computer.
9. Somewhere in your pitch, you must name drop someone famous or important in the same technical field as your product concept. The person you name drop must be alive. Make it sound like this person is your long-time friend. You may not name drop the investors in front of you. We are neither famous nor important.
10. In the final 90 seconds of the pitch, you must wrest control of the discussion (if you don't have it) and make your Ask. This must be spoken out loud before the end of the pitch or the investors will lose focus and forget about you once your time is up. Try to get a verbal affirmation from the investors that they understand what you're asking for and see whether they feel positive or negative about the prospects of investing in your business.
    1. Your grade is not dependent on whether you get these two investors to like your idea. You're going to have to pitch this idea to literally hundreds of investors before you find one that will say yes.
    2. Just like in user discovery, use every pitch to gain feedback on how to improve your idea and the pitch for the next iteration.
11. After your pitch ends, the instructors will ask you if you plan to take your idea and turn it into a real startup. Discuss this with your team before the pitch begins so you have an answer that you all agree to. Note: if you say yes, it doesn't mean everyone has to want to be part of the real startup. It just means at least one of you wants to keep going.

We highly recommend you practice your pitch with your friends. If you have any friends majoring in business or who have startup or industry experience, pitch to them. Take their feedback and use it to improve your pitch before you come to the final.