3 Steps to the Perfect 3-Minute Pitch Whether you're looking for partners, investors or guidance, you need to be able to communicate a succinct summary of your startup's value.

Chelsea Fagan launched The Financial Diet last year as a real-life money blog for Millennials. This is not your father's investing newsletter: Posts have included "One Day, I Woke Up and My Car Was Missing" and "How Not To Be an Egg Donor."

Fagan had previously worked as creative director of brand content at Thought Catalog, an independent online magazine that reaches more than 18 million readers monthly. When she decided to pursue The Financial Diet full time, she figured that with her experience creating custom content, shaping a compelling three-minute pitch to attract corporate sponsors would be easy.

But crafting that pitch proved harder than expected. "I'd never had to distill an entire brand concept down to a few minutes in front of a client. It was an entirely new arena of communication," she says. Casual surfers might be pulled in by the mission statement—"The Financial Diet is a blog about the luxury of spending less"—but potential partners would need more. They'd wonder how The Financial Diet was different, and why Fagan should be the one to crack the mystery of how to reach underpaid, underemployed, overly indebted Millennials with usable financial insights. She needed to deliver these answers concisely, and with confidence.