How Pitch got its users

Ship the output as a URL, not a file. A Pitch deck opens in the recipient's browser with animations and embedded Figma frames intact, no account, no download, no app, and any edit the sender makes later is what the viewer sees next time they open the same link. Find the one thing your product produces that gets shown to other people, and make that thing a link a stranger can open in five seconds on a phone.

done whenOpen your own share link in a private window on your phone. If you hit a login wall, a file download, or an app install prompt, your output is not escaping yet.

Never meter the escape. Pitch's Free plan gives unlimited presentations and unlimited sharing links, so nothing caps how many rooms a non-paying user walks your product into. The paywall sits on what the sender wants privately: viewer analytics, slide-level view data, passcodes, custom link names, email capture. Charge for the sender's own benefit, never for the number of outsiders allowed to see the output.

done whenRead your own pricing page and count every limit that caps how many outsiders can see a user's work. If even one exists, your paywall is standing on the wrong side of the door.

Put your mark inside the frame, not in the chrome. On Free workspaces the Pitch logo sits in the bottom left corner of every slide and every exported PDF and PPTX page, so it survives fullscreen presenting, the download, and the re-forward to someone who was not in the meeting. Then make removing that mark the upsell (Pitch sells unbranded links, unbranded exports and a custom domain on paid tiers), which means every free account is a billboard and paying is how you stop being one.

done whenScreenshot your output the way an audience sees it fullscreen, then crop away everything that is not the content itself. If your name is no longer in the crop, your mark is in the wrong place.

Give the recipient a button that takes the artifact. Pitch link settings include Allow duplication, described as letting visitors copy and reuse the presentation in their own workspace. The person watching who thinks 'I want mine to look like that' can have it immediately, and having it means creating a workspace. Put the copy action on the viewer's side of the wall and make the copy land in an account they must create to keep it.

done whenLook at your last 20 signups and count how many began on someone else's shared artifact instead of your homepage. If the answer is zero, recipients have no door in.

Give strangers something to copy before anyone invites them. Pitch keeps a public library of expert-made template decks on pages anyone can browse logged out, each ending in a create-your-presentation action, and lets any deck be embedded by iframe on sites like Squarespace and Webflow so it renders inside pages Pitch does not own. Build the same cold entry: a public, logged-out version of your best output that a person who has never met one of your users can land on and take.

done whenLog out entirely and try to reach a usable, copyable example of your product's output in two clicks from a search engine. If the only thing a stranger can reach is your signup form, you have no cold start.