Pitching: Respira Supplement

Theresa Lina Stevens, Lina Group Inc.

This video offers a case example of how to structure a pitch that will make an audience clamor to hear your offering and embrace it. Author and Lina Group Inc. CEO Theresa Lina Stevens walks through an example of the Why/What/How Message Framework in action by applying it to Respira, a low-cost inhaler invented by students in Stanford’s Design for Extreme Affordability course. (This video will make more sense if you watch this overview of the framework first.) She illustrates how to open with a provocative hook and then build audience anticipation of a solution in just a couple of sentences, so that by the time you describe your offering, the audience is already sold on it. She also demonstrates how to “bend” the framework to boil your message down to just one sentence or even a short tweet. As you watch, you may want to pause at each step to follow her lead in developing your own message platform.