The X-Y-Z Story Pitch
Replace the abstract description of your category with one named company, one specific problem, and what they tried before you.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 80%
Both hosts converge on the same fix for an incomprehensible pitch: stop describing the category and tell one story. Sam supplies the template — X company had Y problem, they tried Z, here is why Z failed, here is what we did instead — and insists on real names rather than placeholders, interrupting the founder mid-answer to demand the actual customer name. Shaan supplies the founder-origin variant: narrate the problem from inside the job where you first hit it, which simultaneously establishes credibility and makes the pain concrete. He reconstructs the 5X pitch live using the founder's own WeWork background, and does it again for a pool-rollup founder, converting a text-heavy slide into a first-person account of selling his own house to buy the first two companies. The mechanism is that a story is checkable — the listener can evaluate whether that specific company plausibly had that specific problem — whereas 'customers need end-to-end data strategies' can be neither believed nor disbelieved. Sam is explicit that he had invented the details he was demonstrating with; the structure is the transferable part, not the facts.
Origin
Sam interrupted a founder describing his category in the abstract, demanded a named customer, and handed him the X-Y-Z structure on the spot; Shaan then rebuilt the same pitch using the founder's WeWork history.
Core principles
- 01One named company beats an accurate description of all of them.
- 02Stories are checkable; abstractions are not.
- 03Your own origin story doubles as credibility and as the problem statement.
- 04Specificity is what makes a listener feel the pain rather than parse it.
- 05The structure transfers even when you have to hunt for the right example.
How to run it
- 1
Name a real X
Choose one actual customer and say their name. Sam cut off the founder's generic answer with a single word — 'name' — until he produced Bank Novo.
- 2
State a specific Y
Describe the concrete problem that customer had: where their customers were coming from, how to personalise the app, how to optimise cash flow — not 'they needed a data strategy'.
- 3
Say what they tried (Z)
Name the prior attempt — a single reporting tool, four separate vendors, hiring engineers. This is what makes the problem feel real rather than invented for the pitch.
- 4
Explain why Z failed
Be concrete about the failure mode: months of integration, twelve times slower, six times more expensive. The gap is the product.
- 5
Show the change, with numbers
State what happened instead and quantify it — business output in weeks rather than months, a $1M run rate during a pilot.
- 6
Use the founder-origin variant where it applies
If you hit the problem in a previous job, tell it first person. Shaan's version: 'when I led data at WeWork, the problem we consistently had was X, and I noticed everyone in this world had the same one.'
In the wild
Shaan and Sam reconstructed the pitch around the founder's WeWork tenure: led data at WeWork through a period of enormous growth, hit a recurring problem, found others had it, bootstrapped a manual solution with friends, automated it, and now companies use one person plus software instead of hiring thirty.
→ Sam noted afterwards he had invented every detail — 'I don't know if any of this is true' — but the founder agreed the structure was right, and Shaan called it a good generic format for a pitch.
For a founder with a text-heavy slide, Shaan supplied a first-person version: this is my pool company, it spits off this much cash, there are 400 of these in Florida, I sold my house to buy two more because they beat my home as an investment, each has paid itself off, and we improved each by over 25% in year one.
→ Sam judged the founder had 'a very good business idea presented slightly differently' — and the founder then volunteered the buried detail that he buys at 10% down with seller financing.
Common mistakes
Using placeholders instead of names
Saying 'a company' or 'customers' keeps the story abstract. Sam interrupted repeatedly until a real customer name appeared, because the name is what makes it land.
Telling a story over a bullet slide
Shaan's specific critique: if you're going to tell a story rather than read the points, put a picture on the screen. A text slide competing with a narrative kills both.
Leading with the market description
Category-level framing sounds like a research report. The listener has no way to judge it, so it produces neither belief nor interest.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders in technical or B2B categories whose product is genuinely hard to describe abstractly.
Not ideal for
Consumer products so self-evident that a screenshot explains them faster than any narrative.
From the transcript
“you use the format that's like x company had y problem yeah they tried z but the problem with z is this so then we…”
“i would use the story of like i led data at wework when we were this size and i grew the company to this size…”
“it was all intellectual it was all theory based whereas you want it to be story based”
From the episode
MFM Demo Day: 5 Startups Pitch Sam & Shaan and Raise $1.7M
MFM Demo Day