7 Steps For You To Become Backable — A summary of Backable by Suneel Gupta
It took me a full Sunday to distil my learnings from the book, and put them into this summary. It’s set me off on an exciting path of redefining my communication style and my narratives; I hope this article can ignite a spark in you to do the same.
The signals of the messages are either bolded or in quotes.
Any paragraph starting and ending with // is my added explanation or note regarding the content.
While the term “pitch’, “idea” or “startup deck” is extensively used because that’s the background of the author, you can generalize this to any situation. a “pitch” can be a “presentation”, a “startup deck” can be a project report, an “idea” can be a story about yourself, etc.
There are 7 ways to be Backable
The opposite of success isn’t failure; it’s boredom
Being Backable is a process of becoming; it’s not an inborn talent or an unattainable goal.
The most exceptional people aren’t just brilliant…they’re backable
The best example of this is Barack Obama — he went from being “so dry that he sucked the air out the room when speaks” in 2000 to winning the Presedentialelection in 2008.
There are some techniques and behaviours one can cultivate to become Backable.
1. Convince Yourself
What moves people isn’t charisma, but conviction. Backable people earnestly believe in what they’re saying, and they simply let that belief shine through whatever style feels most natural. If you don’t truly believe in what you’re saying, there is no slide fancy enough, no hand gesture compelling enough, to save you. If you want to convince others, you must convince yourself first.
Backers can tell when you’re in love with the idea — that’s one reason why it’s so common for backers to back people with a personal attachment to the problem. You don’t need to always have a personal history with the problem — but it should strike an emotional chord.
Incubation Time
Give yourself an incubation time for your idea or your story. Don’t rush to immediately share it. When an idea first forms, it is not fully formed and not ready to share with the world as is. When you share a half-baked idea, you don’t get the response you’d get with a full-baked idea — and that can deflate your enthusiasm and crush your spirits.
During this incubation time, it’s important to move and do things. Do things that either validate the idea, invalidate the idea, or develop it. You can take actions, gather information, etc. — tangibly move forward with it.
It’s important to give a deadline for this incubation period. “As long as it takes” can easily turn into an indefinitely long incubation period where nothing happens in the end.
Practical Tip
An example with pitch decks -
People generally spend 80% time on pitch decks, and the remaining time incubating the actual concept. Reverse that — spend 80% time convincing yourself, and the remainder of the time pulling together slides or presentations, or whatever is needed to convince a backer.
TLDR
You’re much better jumping in with high conviction and low production-value material than the other way around.
Steer into Objections
There will always be objections for your ideas, questions that people have. Don’t avoid them. Answer them head first, without prompting, in the initial stage, because that’s going to be on the listeners mind. Once you’ve answered them, the listener is going to be more inclined to hear the rest of your pitch or presentation.
Throwaway work
Working through a new idea is an active process — it means putting in the work so you have enough to take a step back and ask if you’re headed in the right direction.
This means that there will inevitably be work you do that won’t be put put into the world.
Don’t fall for the Sunk Cost Fallacy in these cases, and stop yourself from doing work for the fear of it not being useful. All the work you do is iterative, especially over the long run — think of it as polishing the sword before you use it out in a battle.
Measure your emotional runway
The only way your energy will stay high throughout the process of incubating and then testing out your idea or narrative is if it’s replenished by your emotional passion for doing it; Intellectual interest is essential, but not sufficient to keep you going through lows and time.
2. Cast A Central Character
Good stories help you see the charcter in the story. Great stories help you see yourself in the story.
Choose One Person
As individuals, we’re wired to care about individuals. A problem is easier to relate to when it’s one person facing it, as opposed to statistical millions facing it. As humans, we don’t intuitively understand or visualize statistics of large numbers. Therefore, explain your problem or idea through the narrative of a single central character playing out their life.
Remember: a well-told story isn’t a substitute for the facts and figures of your pitch. The elephant and the rider both matter. The facts and figures are what develop the perspective on the scale of your issue; But starting with a story helps your backers be invested into your problem to better appreciate the numbers.
// Interestingly, the Representativeness heuristic is likely a contributing factor. We believe in the probability of certain things being true if the event or entity in consideration is representative of a prototype of the population to which we’re generalizing it to. In this context, when we show the story of a user, it’s a story that many people can relate to, and it’s easy to assume that a lot of people share the story. When we show the user facing the big problem in the story, the heuristic implies that we believe all users with this story face the same problem. //
Create a Storyboard
Storyboards act as empathy bridges between your customer and your backer.
It’s the story that the customer is living, and the problem they’re facing or the solution they’re using is a part of this story.
Storyboard help everyone identify the key moments in the story or the experience that need extra focus.
Keep your Character in sight
A strong central character isn’t just about a single presentation — it will help you build marketing campaigns, investment approaches, relationships, recruitment; essentially every aspect that requires communicating your story.
3. Find an Earned Secret
Great ideas typically stem from an “earned secret” — a non-obvious secret you’ve discovered by going out into the world, and learning something not a lot of other people know.
Go beyond Google. That’s where the secrets lie.
Intoxicate them with Effort
Focus on the “How” of your Earned Insight
How you arrive at an idea can be as memorable as the idea itself.
A good story of how you arrived at the idea can convince the backer of legitimacy of the idea itself.
Show the Effort
Once you’ve gone beyond Google, make sure your pitch demonstrates your effort. Don’t share just your idea, but the effort as well — the work you did in the field that brought you to it. This might sound obvious, but it’s often missed.
An idea that stems from hands-on experience is way more backable than the same exact idea if it simply originated sitting behind a desk.
When you’ve put in a lot of effort to generate and develop the idea, show your backers the effort. It’s not the fancy story of instant epiphanies and instant perfect execution that will make people believe in you — it’s showing your grit, and the amount of effort you’ve put in to validate the idea, that will.
But the catch is, without being boastful, you have to make that effort shine through your pitch. It can’t be hidden.
4. Make it feel Inevitable
A typical pitch might communicate an idea is new. A powerful pitch communicates the idea is inevitable.
Become an Armchair Anthropologist
Put on your anthropological hat and become a cultural anthropology
The question to ask is, “What is the shift in the world that is making your idea matter?”
Doing this has two benefits -
- It shows how your idea fits into the future. When we’re building something, we aren’t building for today’s world. The things that service today are already built. We’re inherently building something for the future. By talking about the shift, we show our backers how our story or solution will unfold to solve for the needs of tomorrow.
- It answers the vital question of why now. It’s common knowledge that Nature hates a vacuum. The question of why this particular need hasn’t been solved before inevitably arises when we’re presented with something new. You don’t want someone to believe it’s because you aren’t really solving a problem; you want them to believe you’re solving a problem that has started to become very relevant, but wasn’t before.
With or Without Us
The point of talking about the shift in the world is to show that the change we’re trying to bring in will happen inevitably, with or without us.
Showing that the change is inevitable means showing that your vision isn’t necessarily unique — it’s just slightly ahead.
People don’t want to bet on newness and uniqueness. Extensive studies on loss aversion have shown us that we value losses at least twice as much as we value gains. By showing the inevitability of the change, we’re creating FOMO in our backers to neutralise their fear of taking a bad bet (a potential loss). A win does not neutralise a loss because of loss aversion. A biggger loss neutralises a loss.
Show Momentum
It’s not enough to show that your idea is inevitable. You also have to show that your idea is in forward motion. Momentum makes FOMO feel real. Without it, your case for inevitability can fall flat.
Your backer might believe that the shift is inevitable, but it’s momentum that shows that you’re the right person to be a part of that shift.
You don’t need tons of momentum to create FOMO and show signs of inevitability; You need enough to is how that your idea is valid.
Real action should be taken to ride the inevitable wave.
Have Vision, Not Visions
When you have multiplicity of visions, it’s difficult for your backers to back you for your vision. Your backers can start believing that you’re wasting effort and resources because you’ve lost your sense of vision and direction.
Make sure your vision is rooted in reality. It’s about where the world is going, not where the world should be going according to you.
5. Flip Outsiders to Insiders
Salman Rushdie once wrote “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence”
We’re absent from the discussions that decide the fate of our ideas. That’s why, when we pitch, we aren’t just looking for a backer — we’re looking for an advocate. Someone who can represent the idea with the same enthusiasm as you.
Common wisdom dictates that great work = great idea + great execution. But there’s a secret step in between — turning outsiders into insiders so when you’re idea reaches execution stage, you arrive together with others who matter.
This can be achieved through a cognitive bias called the IKEA effect, which dictates that we attach up to 5 times more value to something we’ve created compared to when the same thing is given to us completed.
Bring the people you are counting on into your creative process so they feel like co-owners of the idea. Even if it feels uncomfortable, don’t be afraid to let others put their fingerprints on your projects. Make them an insider and they’ll feel invested in your success.
Practical Tip
A startup pitch deck typically has a “backup” section. These are slides that can be referenced after the initial pitch and during discussion. When I first started pitching Rise, only 10 percent of my overall deck was in the backup section. After backable people helped me reshape my deck, over 50 percent of my deck was in the backup section. Instead of sharing all of the details up front, I’d share the high-level idea and vision — then open it up to discussion. As a result, each pitch began to feel less like a presentation and more like a collaboration
Share what it Could Be, not how it Has to Be
When you share your idea through the angle of what the high-level problem and high-level solution is, you open the floor up for discussing where all the idea can go and what it can become. The more detailed and exact your solution is in the early stages, the less interested others will feel in participating in co-creating it.
The Story of Us
Most great political speeches include three stories: the “story of me,” “the story of you,” and most important, the “story of us” — what happens when we join forces and work together. John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech masterfully did this when he laid out a bold agenda and then challenged people everywhere to ask what “together we can do for the freedom of man.”
People often tell the “Story of Me”, occasionally the “Story of You”. Backable people tell the “Story of Us” to their backers, why that particular backer is a specific fit for their idea above any other backer. When we miss this part of the story, we miss the chance to turn an outsider into an insider.
3 Steps for The Story of Us
First, identify a gap in your idea that relates directly to a strength in your backer. A gap could be anything from needing to figure out the right marketing strategy to hiring the right people.
Second, learn as much as possible before your meeting. Although you will be highlighting a gap, you still want to be able to engage your backer with the right questions and discussion. This takes preparation. In fact, I’ve learned it takes more preparation to create a discussion than to create a presentation.
Finally, when you meet with your backer, be sure to directly express the “story of us”. Explain how your gap and their strength fit together to unlock your idea. Don’t assume that they’ll connect the dots
Make Them the Hero
In order to chart a truly epic career, “You need to make everyone you enlist a hero, not just in your story, but in their own.
To feel like heroes, we need to know that what we said and did made an impact. So find ways to make your backers feel like the Hero by showing them explicitly the kind of impact they’re having on your idea.
We don’t typically win people over in one conversation, but through a series of interactions that builds trust and confidence. Even if the last conversation went poorly, you can use the next one to show them how they influenced your work. This type of follow-up is so powerful that it can often change a backer’s response from no to yes.
Share Just Enough
When you’re pitching a new concept, your idea can’t be 100% defined. This means that you need to create room for backers to be a part of it. Share just enough to spark their imagination, but not so much that you give them a reason to say no.
6. Play Exhibition Matches
It’s exceedingly rare it is for someone to practice before their pitch. We’ll spend hours researching, outlining, pulling together slides — but very little time practicing what we’re going to share. The feeling seems to be that if we have the right content and we know it well enough, then there’s no need for practice.
But backable people tend to practice their pitch extensively before walking into the room. They practice with friends, family, and colleagues. They’re rehearsing on jogs with running partners, in the break room, and during happy hour. They prepare themselves for high-stakes pitches through lots of low-stakes practice sessions — what we call exhibition matches.
No Venue is too Small
For backable people, no venue is too small for an exhibition match. The only requirement is the ability to practice in front of someone other than yourself. Simply having a real human staring at you is enough to put you into real practice mode.
When you’re practicing, don’t share an overview of what you’re going to share. Share exactly what you’re going to share.
Playing exhibition matches not only deepens your practice but deepens your relationships. Friends and family may like to be invited into your creative process. And if no venue is too small, the world becomes your stadium.
Be Willing to be Embarrassed
The first practice session is always the hardest, because you’re letting someone else see the roughest edges of your pitch. One of the big reasons we never played exhibition matches is because we want to avoid any negative feedback.
Reid Hoffman says it best:
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of what you’re shipping, you’ve launched too late
Backable people teach us that long-term success can come from short-term embarrassment. Compelling presenters who seem to speak naturally and off the cuff are often the product of lots of practice rounds. They’ve practiced so much that their speech seems unpracticed. Maureen Taylor runs a communication coaching service in Silicon Valley that works with senior leaders inside companies like Disney, General Electric, and Hilton. When asked how many of her clients were naturals, she didn’t hesitate before saying, “None of them.”
Don’t ask “What do you Think?”
Resist the temptation to ask a generic, open-ended question like “What do you think”
// It requires too much effort for a listener to create a list of actionable points based on everything you’ve said //
Instead, ask for specific feedback by digging beneath the surface level and asking specific questions.
Backable people know that the feedback “I like it” isn’t helpful at all. By digging deep into specific questions, they not only try to figure out what went right but also what could be done better.
// I use a simple feedback mechanism with my team after every activity. I ask each of them to state only one thing that went right, and one thing that can be done better next time. By building on small actionable feedback steps, we’re able to iterate our product or activity into something exponentially better in a short span of time. //
Sometimes the best insight comes from how people act, not what they say. A friend may not want to hurt your feelings, so pay attention to nonverbal cues — facial expressions, nodding, smiling at the right moments — to tell whether your delivery is landing.
Build Your Backable Circle
Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and an expert on relationships and sexuality. Perel argues that
Marriages fail because we expect our partner to give us “what once an entire village used to provide.”
Perel says we put it on one person to “give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise.” And when they fall short on delivering on all of this, we blame them.
Marriage counselors often challenge their clients to shift this burden from one person to a circle of people, including friends and family, each of whom fills a different need. Your spouse or partner is part of the circle, but not the full circle required to make you feel whole.
Your support system for Exhibition Matches and your backers are the same way. There are 4 types of characters in a “Backable Circle” you should build -
A. Collaborator
The first is your collaborator. This is someone who’s going to help you expand your idea and improve your delivery. They’re not going to agree with everything you say, but all feedback is going to feel productive. When you’re with a collaborator, you feel like you’re in a musical jam session — riffing off each other and lifting your concept to a better place.
B. Coach
While your collaborator will help you figure out if your idea is right for the world, your coach will also help you understand if an idea is right for you. Just because an idea is a good fit for the market doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for you.
C. Cheerleader
This isn’t the person who’s going to give you critical feedback, but rather the person who’s going to make you feel confident before you get in the room. Hockey players will warm their goalie up before a game with practice shots that are easy to block. The goal, in those final minutes, is to build the goalie’s assurance, not his skill.
D. Critic
The fourth C — your “Cheddar” or “Critic” — is the most pivotal role in your circle. Your Cheddar is the person who will deliberately poke holes in your ideas, sometimes in a way that is deeply unsettling. They ask the tough questions so that we’re not hearing them for the first time from a backer. Most of us tend to steer clear of the Cheddars in our life. We run away from people who can be the most critical of our ideas. But these are the people who get us best prepared, because backers are a lot like Cheddar. Their job is to find your blind spots.
The rule of 21
Your presentations and meetings can very easily get derailed. You get asked an unexpected question; the connection to your laptop stops working; people shuffle in and out of the room. Some people are natural improvisers, and can easily flow through stumbles and interruptions. But more often than not, people who have reached this level of fluidity have built what I refer to as “recovery muscle.” They’re so comfortable with their material that they welcome curveball moments.
Here’s one to describe that feeling of confidence: “I go into the room with a lot of confidence. But the confidence isn’t what you think. It’s not that I’m going to play it perfectly. It’s knowing that I’m for sure going to screw something up. But because I’ve practiced so much, I have confidence that I can recover. Knowing that makes me feel bulletproof onstage.”
The way to feel bulletproof is by building up your recovery muscle so much that you can recover from any mistake you inevitably make.
Here’s the author’s experience with practicing 21 times -
“Around my tenth practice round, I felt something new. I knew the material so well that I no longer needed to focus on it. Instead, I could use that attention span to survey my audience. I could observe how each message was landing, and make adjustments along the way. In earlier practice rounds, if someone seemed confused, I’d simply move on to the next point.
Now I found myself being able to adjust on the fly — I would slow down and re-emphasize for clarity. If they seemed excited, I’d dial up my energy even more. If they laughed, I’d smile with them. My talk was starting to feel more like a dance than a pitch.
Around my fifteenth exhibition match, I felt unflappable. I welcomed any mistake I might make in my pitch just to get a chance to flex my recovery muscle.”
Here’s the important thing — Backers will rarely sit quietly through an entire pitch, unless they’re bored. They cut in with questions, ask you to go back, ask you to jump ahead. None of this is bad, because it means your backer is actually engaged. And if you can glide through the choppiness — jumping from point 3 to point 9 and then transitioning smoothly back to 4 — those are the moments when your confidence shines through.
Reboot your Style
If you play enough exhibition matches, you’ll start to see patterns in the feedback. Sometimes you’ll realize that your entire pitch isn’t working. Instead of throwing away your dream, have the courage to reboot your style and begin again. Nearly every successful person has done this. Want proof? Search for an old speech of someone you admire and notice how their communication style has changed.
7. Let Go of Your Ego
The other techniques in the book show you how to get comfortable with the content, but you still have to learn to get comfortable with yourself. You have to learn to let go of your ego.
Learn to express, not impress.
Show, Don’t Tell
In almost every pitch, no matter the industry or setting, people are more confident when they’re in “huddle mode,” showing their idea rather than describing it. When you’re freely discussing your idea, rather than trying to present a polished and artificial narrative of it isn’t your normal discussion style. Don’t just present your ideas — show them the real product and talk about the way you think about it.
Forget Yourself
When you walk into a room to present your idea, the spotlight is on you. When we believe the spotlight is on us, our confidence and personality tend to shrink and we start becoming inauthentic.
Your job is to turn that spotlight away from you and toward your message. We tend to be more passionate when we’re advocating for someone or something other than ourselves. This holds good only when it’s true. When you genuinely believe in something, people can tell your belief is real.
Find The Passionate Few
There’s a difference between customizing your pitch and shoehorning it into something it’s not. Even if the shoehorning works and the backer says yes, it almost always leads to issues downstream. Investors pull out when the roadmap isn’t what they expected. Films get axed in post-production because there wasn’t a shared vision in pre-production. R&D projects get derailed in phase 2 because the vision wasn’t fully expressed during phase 1.
Most people aren’t going to like your idea, and that’s okay, because what you really need are a few people to love it. Just as an artist needs only a few galleries to feature her, a lawyer needs only a couple of partners to advocate for his promotion, and a screenwriter needs only one studio to say yes.
After being rejected by every investor the author initially pitched, he learned there are always more investors out there. Just as there are always more fellowship programs, government grants, and art exhibitions. Even inside big company cultures, creative people pitch their ideas to multiple different divisions before finding a sponsor. Once you realize the power of the passionate few, you no longer need to bend yourself into something that doesn’t feel like you.
The Moment before the Moment
Film directors often describe the brief period before they yell “Action!” as “the moment before the moment.” What happens during those seconds can be as influential as the weeks, months, and years of preparation leading to them. It’s that moment in the lobby before an interview, that moment at your desk before a key presentation, that moment before the doors open to your art exhibit.
It’s at these moments where it’s most important to forget your ego. Your ego can distort reality — it can make it seem like the stakes are so much higher than they really are thereby inducing fear into you. At times like this, try getting yourself back to a space of clarity of thought — think rationally about what the best case and worst case scenarios really are, and don’t let your emotions cloud your judgement.
The Game of Now
That there are two types of people in this world. There are those who play the Game of Someday and those who play the Game of Now
When you have a problem or an idea, don’t push it to the mythical land of “Someday” — instead, work on it now.
The craziest ideas — the ones that are most likely to change the world — are often the hardest to sell. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. We build the skills and invest the energy to make ourselves backable. And we realize, as all backable people eventually do, that when you get dismissed, there is always another room.
When we play the Game of Now, the direct result of what we do isn’t the end of the story. Our actions might not lead to success beyond expectations — but our actions can inspire others to take action.
“The Game of Now may not always lead to success. But the opposite of success isn’t failure; it’s boredom. So let’s play this game together. Let’s fight for the ideas that make us come alive and inspire good people to join us in the game. Let’s experience moments that we’ll cherish forever, even when it hurts. Because you are ready.”
