Advice on Licensing Your Product Idea to a Company: Don’t Use a Pitch Deck, Use a Sell Sheet!

00:00

Do you use a pitch deck when reaching out to prospective licensees?

No, I use a thing called a sell sheet. Think of it as a print ad. I just email it to them. I try to be very short and concise with how I pitch. That way, think about the person receiving these emails—they’re receiving hundreds of thousands of emails with pitch decks, with full on long essays. They're not going to read that. They don't have time for that. And you're probably going to be—they're already burnt out from it, so they're gonna say, “No, it's too much to think.”

00:32
When you say, and I just want to clarify, when you say a sell sheet, it's basically like a resume for your product.They say a resume should not be two pages unless you know there's some—-

A resume is still a little bit too much information. It's a print ad—

But it's one sheet of paper, one sheet it should be—

It’s like a print ad magazine. It's a lot easier metaphor to think of, and it's more direct. It's exactly like a print ad, except the person that's looking at is not a potential customer. It's a potential licensee that's thinking about the potential customer.