The Fachgespräch: how to pitch your EXIST idea to the PTJ and the Gutachten panel

For EXIST and most comparable programmes, the written application is a filter, not the decision. Teams that clear the paper round are invited to a Fachgespräch - a structured conversation, usually thirty to sixty minutes, in front of the Projektträger (for EXIST, the PTJ) and a panel of independent Gutachten drawn from research and industry. A short pitch opens it; the rest is questions. The panel has already read your Ideenpapier, so they are not there to hear you read it back. They are there to test whether the people in the room match the application on paper, and whether the plan survives contact with informed scepticism.

This reframes the whole prep. The goal is not to be impressive; it is to be credible under pressure. The teams that win the room are the ones who answer the hard question directly, admit what they do not yet know, and show they have thought one layer deeper than the application could fit. The teams that lose it are the ones who over-claim, talk past the question, or let one founder dominate while a co-founder visibly cannot defend their own section.

The exact questions vary, but a handful recur across nearly every Fachgespräch, because they map directly onto the evaluation criteria. Prepare a crisp, evidenced answer for each before you walk in.

A common avoidable failure is letting the most confident founder field every question. The panel reads that as a one-person show wearing a team costume, and the team criterion takes the hit. Agree in advance who leads on which topic: the technical founder takes feasibility and innovation, the commercial founder takes market and business model, and whoever owns the plan takes milestones and finance. But every founder must be able to give a competent first answer on any topic, because the panel will deliberately ask the technical founder a market question to see if the team actually talks to each other.

Practice the handoff explicitly. "That's a question for my co-founder, who owns our go-to-market - over to her" is a clean, confident move that shows a functioning team. An awkward silence while you both wait for the other to speak is the opposite signal. Run at least two mock Fachgespräche with someone willing to ask hostile questions; the discomfort in the practice room is the price of composure in the real one.

You will get a question you do not have a clean answer to. That is by design - the panel probes until it finds an edge. The damage comes not from the gap but from how you handle it. Bluffing a confident wrong answer is the worst option, because an expert panel spots invented numbers instantly and it poisons their trust in everything else you said. The strong move is to say what you do know, mark clearly where your knowledge ends, and state how you would find the answer: "We haven't validated the exact regulatory pathway yet; our plan books a month-three legal review with a named MedTech advisor specifically to close that."

Show your work the same way on the finance side. If they ask why a Sachkosten line is sized the way it is and you genuinely estimated it, say so and say how you would tighten it - do not retrofit a fake justification. Panels reward teams that reason transparently and penalise teams that defend every number to the death. This is also a place to be explicit that you have not taken this as legal or tax advice and will confirm the details with a professional; that honesty reads as maturity, not weakness.

Re-read your own application the night before as if a stranger wrote it, and write down every question you would ask. Those are the questions the panel will ask. Build a one-page answer sheet, but do not script full answers - scripted answers sound rehearsed and collapse the moment the question is phrased differently. Prepare the spine, improvise the words. Have your three strongest pieces of evidence (a customer quote, a technical result, a metric) memorised cold, because you will want to reach for at least one in almost every answer.

On the day: arrive early, test the screen-share if it is remote, and decide who opens. Keep the opening pitch to the time given and not a second longer - going over time on the one part you control signals you will not respect the panel's. Then breathe, listen to the full question before answering, and let the conversation be a conversation. The panel is not your enemy; most reviewers genuinely want to fund good teams and are giving you the chance to prove you are one.