The real make-or-break moment for any founder who's pitching investors or customers isn't the actual pitch. Yeah, you heard that right. The less-discussed but extremely important skill you really need: answering questions so the people on the other side feel certain in your abilities to deliver results. When you have a conversation that excites your audience – rather than a one-direction stream of information that bores them – you're far more likely to get the yes. Every situation has a clock ticking, and everybody has a limited attention span. With those facts in mind, your host and communications expert Kirin Kalia shares her top three criteria for any answer in episode 3 of Message Worth Millions: * QUICK - 30 seconds or less, no matter the topic. * CLEAR & DIRECT - no jargon or buzzwords, no long sentences. * CONFIDENT - word choice, tone of voice and body language. So just how do you prepare? Kirin's process starts with researching what matters to the people you're meeting with (or who's judging you, if it's a competition), then writing down all the questions you've gotten before or can expect. Next, record and time your answers, ideally with a team member to keep you honest. Although it's not fun, review your answers and determine how you can make them quicker, clearer and more confident. Practice again :) Kirin also takes you through five key questions from investor Nicole DeTomasso [https://x.com/nic_detommaso/status/1909611788313985202] and answers two of them as if she were a founder of Dex, a language-learning toy company that recently raised $4.8M [https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/20/dex-is-an-ai-powered-camera-device-that-helps-children-learn-new-languages/]. Nicole's questions: 1. What's the unique pain point? 2. How are you solving it? 3. What is your earned secret in solving this problem? Why you? 4. What's your go-to-market strategy? Near-term and at scale? 5. Why is now the time to build this solution? And for you female founders, watch this TED talk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hokUdXYRe2Q] from founder turned business school professor Dana Kanze so you know the difference between a prevention (defense) and a promotion (offense) question and how to handle the prevention ones that (unfortunately) you're more likely to get from investors. Message Worth Millions is a weekly podcast for startup founders like you who want to raise money and grow their revenue faster. You need a message that moves your audience – usually investors and customers – to say YES…and all those yeses add up :)