(This is from a post on Quora. It’s received a lot  of love (thank you!), so I’ll add it here too. Check it out yourself.)

In the last year I’ve seen thousands of startup pitches while working with the AngelList crew, coached 100+ founders on how to communicate their product, traction and team, and worked with startups in fine institutions like 500 Startups, AngelPad and Bootup. I’ve also dissected 500+ emails from a recent seed round fundraising to map investor response. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Through thousands of pitches, I’ve found that fewer that 5% tell a great traction story.

Here are 10 tips that can help.

But first, let’s get one thing straight – this is the only thing that matters to investors:

Venture investors invest in momentum. Traction is your story of momentum. It’s told through quantified evidence of market demand for your product.

(Here I’ll bring in Alec Baldwin for a little help. Remember ABC in Glengarry Glen Ross? Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y…. Now think ASM: Always Show Momentum. That’s what this is all about. ASM.)

Here we go.

1) Compress your X Axis

The X axis is how long you’ve been working. The shorter, the better. Consider two startups below, both at the same number of users:

As an investor, who would you bet on? Blue, of course, because they’ve moved faster. So as a startup, how can you show that you’re moving fast? Set reference points to effectively shorten the period.

Consider these two messages, for the same consumer web product:

“We started in 2008, and have 5000 users.”

Here, an investor’s thinking: ’5000 users/36 months = painfully slow growth.’

“We started to experiment in 2008. We built the alpha of our current product in late 2010, and just launched the beta in February. We already have 5000 users.”

Here, she’s likely to think ‘they took awhile to find the right fit, but now they’re moving fast – 5000 users in beta is pretty good!’

Same progress, different message. Psychologically, you’re anchoring a better reference point in their minds. In the second example you’re anchoring them around the beta launch, not the beginning of your startup.

More examples:

“We started experimenting with this in 2008, and took a year to understand the space. Last September we quit our jobs to build this full time. Since then, we’ve built the alpha and then launched a second beta version, now with 5000 users.”

That’s anchoring them around the point that the team fully committed.

“We started experimenting in 2008, and built a couple iterations of the product. We found product-market fit with this version in August, and are now in beta, with 5000 users.”

That’s anchoring around this product version.

There are 9 more tips. See them here.

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