Startup Pitching Tips for Dummies - Win Over Investors & Win Competitions!
Why You Need to Learn How to Pitch Pitching can be a major problem for geeks and techies, in general, who may be brilliant at almost everything apart from public speaking and schmoozing. That was certainly the case for our founder Philippe Laval, who is more comfortable writing code and developing startups than selling them. But he realized, as most of you probably do, that no matter how attractive your product or how great your founding team, you’ve got to be able to explain it, and sell it to potentially wary investors, quickly and directly. And at the same time stand out from the crowd of other startups looking for attention. Imagine having to learn how to do all that, and in a foreign language, which English is for our French founder! But, rather than being discouraged, Philippe put all the enthusiasm he usually uses to develop new products to learn how to pitch properly. And, as you can see from the results, it worked! What did he advise you to include? Paul was very precise about what needs to be in good pitch: 1. Start with a story to draw in your audience. I had the chance of the founding of the Evercontact idea being related to a personal love story, so I used it 2. Move to the problem you are trying to solve. Ours is, of course, the difficulty for busy professionals to maintain their main contact lists without missing people or relevant information like the latest phone number. 3. Then, talk to your core customers. In our case, we already have thousands of users from all sorts of professional fields including bigger names like Flipboard and Disney, so this was easy. 4. Next, demonstrate some proof of success. Besides the user base I already mentioned, we have testimonials from evangelists like Robert Scoble.To make sure you stand out from the crowd, talk about what is different with your product. In our case, it was the total automation for ease of use, the reliability of email signatures as the best source of real information, and our algorithm that provides 100% accuracy. 5. After that, present key members of your team with great track records to show that you are serious. We have directors who were previously key players at Gawker Media, Thales, and Sinequa, as well as backing from the investment team at AXA Strategic Ventures 6. Numbers to show traction come next, this is easy for us as we have analyzed over 1 billion signatures for over 100,000 accounts. 7. And last, but not least, tell them why we need their money and what’s in it for them if we get it! In our case, we have lots of exciting development plans that will allow us to grow our user base by providing even better service. Click here to learn more http://blog.evercontact.com/startup-pitching-tips-for-dummies-win-over-investors/?utm_source=Slideshare&utm_medium=Outbound&utm_campaign=Slideshare%20Pitch
