The Anti-Pitch: When haters hate your startup idea

The optimist has the Pitch, and the skeptic has the Anti-Pitch.
The Pitch — and sometimes we call it the elevator pitch — is sacred inside the tech industry. We pithily describe a new idea, how it works, and why it’ll work. It should only take 30 seconds. Our technology industry is built on the elevator pitch, because it’s the beginning of trying something new.

The skeptic (boo!) has something else: The Anti-Pitch.

It’s the quick one-liner that’s meant to shut you down. It latches onto one thing that you say in the pitch, quickly puts you down. And if you’re not careful, it works.

Here’s how it appears in a conversation:

• New productivity idea? “Ugh these things always take 4 years to build, it’ll take so much funding. You don’t have the enterprise skills to sell this to big customers”

• New AI idea: “Isn’t this space too busy? I think I just saw this exact idea last week. Isn’t this just a GPT wrapper and Open AI will add this in a few months?”

• New non-AI idea: “Have you thought about adding AI?”

• New social app? “The network effects for Instagram/YT/whatever are too strong. Invite channels are dead. If you get traction they’ll just add a tab in their app to copy you. It’s so hard to monetize with ads these days…”

• New dating app idea? “Dating apps are so hard. Churn constantly happens as people pair off. Best case, Match Group buys you for a small amount…”

• New consumer hardware idea? “The holiday cycle is awful. You’ll either build too much inventory and bankrupt the company, or you won’t sell enough and you’ll miss your shot. If you win, China will rip you off…”

• New Cursor for X competitor? “We’ve just seen 10 of these in the past few months. It’s such a busy space, it’ll be really hard to break out. We’ve already seen one in XYZ category fail, it’s not as easy as it looks”

• New VR idea: “Apple Vision isn’t doing well. Do people want to wear goggles on their face? I’ve seen the stat that millions of people have bought VR, but do they use them?”

• New online edtech idea: “There’s too much free content already, isn’t YouTube your biggest competitor? Isn’t AI going to disrupt education completely?”

• New subscription idea: “Another subscription? Doesn’t everyone just cancel anyway? Won’t this just be part of Prime/whatever”

• Or, a few funny pairs:

  • Really brand new idea: “Seems like a lot of market risk? Have you done customer validation?”

  • Existing idea with a new innovation: “Really, yet another XYZ app?”

I could go on and on :) And you could too, you’ve certainly heard these. It’s truly the skeptic’s favorite tool. We can also admit that occasionally, we are the ones to think (though hopefully not say) these things.

The anti-pitch is lazy
Of course, the anti-pitch is the lazy way to think. After all, new things are very hard and are often bound to fail, and if you work in the tech world, you know that perhaps 10,000s of startups are funded each year and maybe 1-2% end up being anything. So 99% of the time, the skeptic would be right.

And yet we wouldn’t have new things if we all thought this way. Thank god the world has amazing new startup founders that still persist even when confronted with the difficulties. Plus, you often read about people being skeptical of the internet or Uber or whatever, trashing it with an anti-pitch, and years later it sounds real dumb.

So what's an optimistic founder to do?

The choices
When confronted with the Anti-Pitch, an optimist has a few choices:

• Ignore (eh, who cares what they think?)

• Accept, but then address the criticism

• Deny deny deny

These are all fine reactions in many cases, but they serve different purposes:

Ignore. Now, if the criticism is coming from your ideal customer, a candidate you're trying to recruit, or an investor, that's one thing. But often, the skepticism comes from someone whose opinion just doesn't matter. For example, it could just be some rando you met at a dinner party who's closed-minded and working in a dinosaur industry. You don't need to convince them, and there's very little upside or downside in going either way. Just ignore them. Maybe worse yet, there are some people in the world whose job *is* to criticize. Some of these people are called mainstream journalists. In the past decade, a whole industry has formed around trashing new technology products. And whether they're right or wrong, they're able to get clicks and traffic and create advertising revenue. So you should definitely ignore those people.

Sometimes the anti-pitch comes from someone whose opinion actually matters, like your ideal customers. If they don't get it, that's a really good question. On one hand, they simply might not know what they want. The often-quoted Henry Ford quip about faster horses makes exactly that point. This is especially true for new ideas with a creative or aesthetic component. It's tough to argue that you’re building, say, an email app that is just super well-designed and that you’ll win based on better design. It's hard to imagine the emotions and feelings a product will evoke. It's like describing the plot of a movie—you don't really know if it's good or bad until you actually watch it.

Criticism really stings when it comes from an ideal customer who gets what you're trying to do but just doesn't like it. In that case, they might just be a later adopter than you thought. Or maybe they care a lot about the problem you're solving, which is good, but they don't like *how* you're solving it. There might be a grain of truth in there, so listen.

Accept, then address the criticism. One of the really hard things about the Anti-Pitch is that it's often meme-like in its simplicity. It just ties onto one thing that you've said and tries to deposition every aspect of your idea. You might then decide to accept that. You might say, "Yes, this *is* the 10th investor-backed AI app for dog trainers, but..." But then you better have something interesting or clever to say after that.

This strategy works best when you're bringing something genuinely new to the table. Timing and innovation become critical. That's why, in this era of AI, it's easier to get a "yes." You can say, "We might be the tenth product in this category, but we're the first AI-native version. Here are three things we can do that no one else can." The problem, of course, is that you need to have an innovation or an insight. If someone's criticizing your consumer hardware, and then you go off on some new tangent about why your new gadget is so innovative, but you don't ultimately address the underlying concerns about the holiday sales cycle, it just sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.

The real danger is accepting the anti-pitch framing of your new product. By accepting their framing, you're already putting yourself in a hole, and you have to dig yourself out. Unfortunately, that is very hard.

Deny. Sometimes you end up in arguments where, if you describe an amazing new AI-powered product for finding restaurants, the "anti-pitch" becomes, "Well, here's why Yelp's business is so hard." You might want to deny that association by saying, "We're nothing like Yelp." The problem is that by saying you're *not* like something, you still connect yourself to that concept. It's the kind of conundrum a politician might face. An interviewer might ask a politician, "Do you think it's a criminal act to do XYZ?" If the politician angrily replies, "I am not a criminal!" then everyone in the audience is just going to think, "Hey, that guy's a criminal."

Pepsi also used this very cleverly to position themselves as the "un-Coke." Of course, by saying they aren't Coca-Cola, they're implicitly saying they *are* like Coca-Cola, just different. They're in the same category. In fact, it might be more clever to reply by saying “Yelp isn't the right comparison. The right comparison is how we're very different than [Booking.com or ChatGPT, or some other more successful thing you want to be compared to].” Again, contrast creates similarity.

Thus, I think “deny” is an option but the right move is to judo into a whole different direction.

The Best Anti-Anti-Pitch is a Good Pitch
What a founder quickly finds is that if their new pitch invites the same criticisms, you can use a little game theory and work backwards. Maybe come up with a better way to describe what you're doing that leads to a different and more positive outcome. For example, a new startup might begin by calling themselves a gambling app, inviting a bunch of criticism about regulatory risk. It might then make sense to iterate to a new version of the pitch that starts with the idea that this is a new predictive markets product. That at least gets you going in a different direction. You might get a different kind of criticism, but it may be that you have better answers.

In this way, you're navigating a maze of potential pitches, and as you hit dead ends, you find new, different ways to pitch your idea. I'm going to call this the "Pitch Maze" and copyright it lol.

To go further, almost every new product idea can be pitched in five or ten different ways. You might have one pitch that's really focused on the team and the people. Another might be focused on a customer need. If you have a dozen different features in your product, you might have different pitches that emphasize each of those. The point is that your ability to pick a pitch out of all the different permutations gives you a lot of leeway to go in whatever direction you want. Each direction might lead to a different universe of responses, criticisms, and doubts, but you can pick the right path that gives you the most advantageous options for responses.

Learning by Pitching
I don’t want to lose the cold, hard fact that there’s a shred or reality in the anti-pitch. For example, it's true that a VR idea might be hard right now because the VR platforms aren't doing well. If you completely ignore that type of consensus statement and try to work around it, you might win the rhetorical battle but lose some real data. This is especially true if that data point comes from someone in the industry or a customer who knows what they're talking about.