We ran a mock pitch this week. One of us played the publisher, the rest of us sat on the other side of a video call and tried to look like people who do this for a living.
I'd prepared for the presentation part. The deck is done, the trailer is done, and I could talk through both half asleep. What I hadn't prepared for was the questions, and our pretend publisher turned out to be quietly brutal. "What happens if this costs twice what you've said?" "Who on the team is the bottleneck?" "Why you?" All asked in a perfectly pleasant voice, which somehow made it worse.
The first thing I learned is that I answer hard questions by talking more. Someone asks about risk and I produce four minutes of reassuring noise. Watching the recording back, there's a moment where I'm clearly still going well after the useful part ended. Everyone was too kind to say anything, so I did it for them.
The second thing is that we don't have a shared answer for some basic stuff. We each had our own version of how we'd describe the studio in a sentence, and they were all fine, and they were all different. Hearing four slightly different companies described in one call is a quick way to learn you have some talking to do.
What surprised me was how much "I don't know yet, but here's how we'd find out" landed better than a confident guess. Every time one of us just said it plainly, the pretend publisher moved on, satisfied. Every time we bluffed, the follow-up question got sharper. I'd always assumed admitting a gap was a loss. It's closer to the opposite.
We've since agreed who takes which kind of question. Money and plans go to one person, the making side goes to another, and the rest of us are allowed to stop talking. That last rule is mostly for me.
None of this is a real conversation, and I'm not going to pretend it tells us how a real one will go. But it's the first time the pitch has felt like something you can get better at, rather than something that just happens to you. We're doing another round on Thursday, with a different person in the hot seat.
— Thiago, working on the art of the short answer
Posted by Thiago Moreira · October 13, 2026
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