Why Your Pitch Deck Is Making Everyone Want to Die (And How to Fix It)

Wow, sorry: Your startup's messaging sounds like R2D2 had a baby with a compliance manual, and nobody wants to adopt it.

I learned this the hard way when I sat down with Suzy Engwall—CEO of HealthTech Strategies and someone who's seen more medtech pitch decks than should be legally allowed—and she absolutely obliterated every assumption I had about how we talk to customers.

The Part Where We All Realize We've Been Doing It Wrong

Here's the tea: You spent nine months perfecting your investor pitch. You can rattle off your TAM, your SAM, your SOM, and whatever other acronym makes VCs feel smart. You've got slides about your "proprietary AI-driven algorithm leveraging machine learning to optimize outcomes."

And literally nobody cares.

Okay, that's not fair. Your mom cares. And maybe your co-founder after three beers.

But that hospital administrator you're trying to sell to? The one with 63 emails marked urgent, a board meeting in 20 minutes, and a migraine that could kill a small horse?

They have no idea what you just said.

The Three-Company Disaster Story That'll Haunt Your Dreams

Suzy told me about this event where four companies presented. Four carefully selected startups, chosen from hundreds, given the stage to shine.

Three of them bombed so hard they're probably still finding pieces of their dignity in the venue parking lot.

The fourth? Line out the door. People waiting to talk to them. Investors circling like sharks who just smelled chum.

The difference?

The first three spent their entire presentation spouting off about in vitro this and in vivo that and clinical trials and algorithms and nobody understood what they actually did.

The fourth company told everyone how they'd make patients' lives better. Simple. Human. Real.

"But Karl," you're thinking, "our technology IS complex! We can't just dumb it down!"

Yes. You. Can.

And more importantly: You. Must.

The ICU Alarm Story That Made Me Want to Throw Money at a Company

Suzy's working with this company called Convoy (look them up, seriously). They've got AI that stops all those non-actionable alarms in hospital ICUs.

Now, she could have spent 20 minutes explaining the machine learning architecture and the signal processing algorithms.

Instead, she painted me a picture: Patients trying to heal but can't sleep because machines are screaming at them all night. Nurses so traumatized by alarm fatigue they hear beeping in their dreams. Staff running around responding to false alarms while real emergencies get missed.

I spent two weeks in an ICU once (brain tumor biopsy, fun times). Those alarms nearly drove me insane. The second she described the problem, I was SOLD. Shut up and take my hypothetical budget.

That's the power of human-to-human connection in a world that's forgotten humans exist.

Your Marketing Shouldn't Need a PhD to Understand

Here's your homework (and I'm dead serious):

Test #1: The 10-Year-Old If a fifth-grader can't explain what your product does after hearing your elevator pitch, you've failed. Kids don't sugarcoat. They'll tell you straight up: "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Test #2: The 60-Second Rule You should be able to explain how your product makes someone's life better in under a minute. Not how it works. Not the tech specs. How it makes an actual human's actual life actually better.

Test #3: The LinkedIn Scroll Test If someone's mindlessly scrolling LinkedIn at 10 PM while their partner passive-aggressively does the dishes, will your post make them stop? Or will they keep scrolling to find out what their former colleague from 2013 thinks about AI?

Stop Selling to Investors When You're Talking to Customers

The story that gets a VC to open their checkbook is NOT the story that gets a hospital to buy your product.

VCs want market size, competitive moats, and hockey stick projections.

Hospital administrators want to know you're not going to make their already-hellish job worse. They want to know their patients will be safer, their staff will be happier, and their board won't eviscerate them for the decision.

It's the same product. Two completely different stories.

Most startups nail the first story and then copy-paste it everywhere like it's the Declaration of Independence. Then they wonder why nobody's buying.

The Part Where I Tell You About Pharmacogenomics Without Making You Want to Die

Suzy dropped this example that's tattooed on my brain now:

Instead of saying "We leverage pharmacogenomic analysis to optimize therapeutic interventions based on individual genetic polymorphisms"...

Say: "We help people with depression find the right medication in weeks instead of suffering through six months of trial and error."

See the difference? One makes you sound smart. The other makes people give a shaet.

This Is Your Wake-Up Call

Look, you built something amazing. You deserve to succeed. But you're sabotaging yourself by talking like a term paper when you should be talking like a human.

The companies winning right now? They're not necessarily the ones with the best technology. They're the ones who can explain why their technology matters without requiring a medical degree and a pot of coffee to understand.

Marketing isn't a "nice to have." It's not something you do after you've figured everything else out. Apple—yes, THAT Apple, the one worth more than your country's GDP—still spends billions on marketing every year.

If they need it, you definitely need it.

Watch the Full Episode (Or Keep Losing Deals, Your Choice)

Suzy dropped about 47.5 more gems in our conversation that I couldn't fit here without turning this into a doctoral thesis. We talked about authentic client connections, reducing client churn in startups, and how to build relationships that actually last in medtech.

[Link to episode]

Seriously, if you're a founder, a VP of anything, or you've ever been in a meeting where someone said "let's circle back on the synergies," you need to hear this.

Because at the end of the day, this isn't B2B. It isn't B2C.

It's H2H. Human to human.

And humans? We just want to know if you're going to make our lives suck less.

That's it. That's the whole game.

P.S. If you read this whole thing and you're STILL planning to lead with your "proprietary algorithm" in your next pitch, I can't help you. But your competitors who actually listened? They're going to eat your lunch, steal your customers, and probably get better funding while they're at it. Choose wisely. ✌️

Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H, human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.