Losing the best pitch I've done was a good thing

Exactly five years ago I made one of the best pitches we’ve done. 

We didn’t win the business.

And I’m so glad.

I can now see how distracted I was—a Fortune 200 brand was flirting with our startup, and I was swooning. I had only been full-time with GoWild for a few months. This felt like a partnership that was going to send us to the moon.

But had we gotten the deal, it could have killed us.

This tale is a good reminder for founders of young startups and leaders of small teams alike.

The start of the journey 

In late 2018, I had just left my contract gig that bridged me from full-time in an agency to full-time at GoWild. September 2018 marked my first days where my only responsibility was GoWild. 

I met a high level marketer at Nissan that same year at an outdoor conference. We built a great relationship, and she was genuinely excited about what we were doing with GoWild. In early 2019, we started chatting about a partnership.

As in, Nissan and my little startup working together. 

At the time, this was the biggest opportunity we’d had. Big brand partnerships legitimize startups—they’re a stamp of approval used for other prospective clients. 

I poured hours upon hours into a proposal that even still today I think looks great. While in Nashville for another convention, I hopped over to have breakfast with a few folks from Nissan. I made my pitch amid cups of coffee and glasses of orange juice. After an hour, I went back to the convention, and felt good about it. 

A few days later I heard back. 

“That’s one of best pitches from a partner that I’ve seen.” 

Wow.

It felt promising. Nissan doesn’t get pitched by just anybody, and often the pitches are coming from groups with agencies behind them. I mean, The Rock had just been in for a partnership meeting. We were officially operating at a big league level. 

I pitched a big league partnership, too. And that’s where I made a key strategic failure. 

The pitch

This pitch was before I overhauled my approach for sales (if you missed that one, you can read about that here). My approach was still spray and pray vs. deep diving the core needs of the potential client first. Still, even with our shotgun approach, we had connected with a good target. 

GoWild was going to help Nissan with authentic connections and storytelling. Our focus was on the brand alignment, commitment to conservation, and highlighting the power of one person’s commitment for change. 

Directly from the pitch deck:

Campaign Goal: Further tie Nissan to conservation and bring the feel good story you have with organizations like Habitat for Humanity to the individual level. This campaign will show the power of one person. 

Concept: What if we call upon the titans and create an opportunity for people to make a difference? “Change Starts with One” is a sub campaign of “Calling All Titans.” We love this line from the Titan ad: “A truck can’t change the world but a Titan can.” Let’s empower people to see the truth in that by offering to help them achieve their ideas for change. 

We were going to crowdsource the design of a custom Nissan Titan capable of stepping up to any task. The community would be engaged in certain elements of the truck design, knowing a chance to win the vehicle was coming. 

The second phase was going to be giving an additional $5,000 away (hey, this was before COVID inflation, cut me some slack for not pitching more) for a volunteer to put to work for whatever program was near and dear to their heart. It could be volunteering with a local hunting mentor group, river cleanups, helping veterans learn to fish—whatever. 

Our team was going to create a video series for the finalists, and GoWild members would vote for who would win.

This part of the pitch was good. 

(OK, actually, don’t pitch truck giveaways to manufacturers—this was one part of the pitch I later learned was far more complicated than I anticipated.)

This specific campaign was packaged with digital and podcast ads, email campaigns, and finally an offering to be our title sponsor.

Yes, we were swinging big. But the pitch got bigger, and that’s where I made a huge mistake. 

The pitch had one major flaw 

Anyone could have made the pitch I just explained. They may not have had our community and app, but influencers could do what we were offering. We wanted to showcase that we were ready to go where others couldn’t. 

Phase II of the pitch had concepts that were not yet a part of our functionality, which started treading into dangerous territory. Pricing custom builds and functionality is tough, and you’re often building for one-time use vs. something you can reuse. 

The first part of Phase II was a new type of display ad for our activity tracker (which you may recall we sunset from a past newsletter). This made sense to me, because I could resell these ad slots for other activities. It would actually increase advertising inventory. 

Then we fell face first into territory that we had no business pitching. 

Copy and pasted raw from the deck:

Podcast Player

We’ll design a podcast player that is exploratory by topics. Whether you’re driving out west for an elk hunt or up to Chicago for steelhead fishing, this app will let people search by topic, not just shows. 

We’ll utilize our expansive database of played podcast and behavioral data to create an AI/machine learning recommendation system. The shows could be posted to our app’s podcast sharing platform from the vehicle, too. 

We had and have a ton of podcast data, but we had never built:
A) A podcast player
B) Built an app for a vehicle
C) Any way to sort this data in real time

This was not going to be something we could reuse—the whole point was exclusivity on this feature. In hindsight, I was distracted with the “brand awareness” opportunity of having an app promoted by Nissan. Even now, I find myself saying, “man, that could have been cool.” Of course it could, but one of the biggest challenges in startup life is not finding cool stuff to build—it’s deciding what not to do. 

Building this out was going to pull us away from our core product and growth. Full stop. 

It only got worse:

Trip tracker

This trip tracker will implement our expertise in activity tracking, mapping and social sharing into the Nissan dashboard. 

With this app integration, the sky is the limit:



• Track photos, complete with geo-tagging



• Host digital geo-caches for road trippers to find. When you claim a digital geo-cache, you earn points on GoWild and can earn badges on the app 

• Ability to tie together several trip logs into one long road trip experience/story on the platform

•

Capture trip stats like states traveled through, miles logged, etc. 

Yes, we pitched a friggin’ trip tracker.

I remember telling my cofounders I wanted to pitch something big that had never been done before. Well, we certainly did it with this. I may have said “the sky is the limit,” but I should have considered that our development capacity wasn’t. This would would have cannibalized the expansion of our product. 

Once again, we had never:

• Built a trip tracker for a car
• Built a geo tagging or geocaching app
• Had badges in GoWild

We were pitching a trip to the moon when the closest thing we had to a rocket ship was a bottle rocket. 

Lesson: Stay true to you

Looking back at this deck, 70% of this pitch was great work that was what we should be doing. We were pitching campaigns that leaned on the marketing tech and community we’d built. We stayed to our true goal of ad campaigns that added value to our members vs. simply exploited them for clicks. 

But the 30% of moonshots would have slowed down development, distracted us from the growth we were achieving, and potentially pivoted the business into a direction that had very few potential partnership fits, should Nissan eventually pull out of the relationship. 

Over the years since, I’ve walked away from many partnership opportunities because they were bad fits. We turn down bad fits for our shop. We walk away from integration opportunities with brands that don’t make sense. We won’t even pitch or sometimes meet with companies who aren’t aligned with our goals. 

When looking at this situation for your business and/or startup, make sure you’re finding partners who will take you to the moon on the vehicle you’re already riding. If you have to try to maintain the vehicle you’re on while trying to build a rocket to complete the deal, there is a decent chance you’re choosing short term gain over long term strategic growth. 

Nissan would have been a killer partner on the 70% that was a good fit. This wasn’t a Nissan problem—this was a Brad problem. I should have never pitched the podcast or activity tracker. 

Questions to ask yourself when pitching partners:

• Is the functionality I’m proposing useful outside of this partnership? Can I repurpose this to monetize elsewhere?

• Will building this slow our core path to growth?

• If I do this, is the long-term growth better with or without the partnership?

Wait, what happened to the pitch?

Ah, so you’re curious as to what happened with “one of the best pitches we’ve ever seen” I guess? Well, the company went into budget freezes after this famous scandal, and my contact eventually left for another opportunity. This pitch opportunity now only lives in my head, Dropbox and now, here.

Content idea for this week

Do you have stories of bad pitches from your past? Did you learn any lessons you could share with your audience? Post on LinkedIn or Twitter about what happened, and what you learned. 

Who I’m listening to: Stephen Wilson Jr.

What I’m reading: “The Bean Trees” by Barbara Kingsolver

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