Defining The Most Important Part of Your Business

This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Andrea Barrica is a Philipino-American woman who was raised in the USA. She is a venture partner residing in San Francisco, and working within a company called ‘500 Startups’. She is also the founder and owner of O.School; which goal is to make sure that the next generations have far more resources than the previous ones when it comes to Education.

Mrs. Andrea Barrica, a very well recognized and international pitch coach, and a venture partner at 500 Startup, was one of our guests during Startup Istanbul 2015. She delivered a speech in which she tackled many aspects regarding pitching when you are a company or an entrepreneur.

The most important aspect of your pitch would be figuring out what exactly is the most important aspect of your business before delivering your pitch in front of the judges. Now, some of you might think that they already know the most crucial and vital part about their businesses -obviously- since you are the ones who came up with the whole idea in the first place. However, some of you might be wrong about that.

What you really should understand about all this is that there is a huge and noticeable difference about what your company’s goals and main actions are, and what is the most important aspect of your business.

In order to help you figure out what is the most interesting thing about your business, Mrs. Barrica gave us the four things that would define that aspect, and which are classified in order of importance according to her. The first and most important thing when it comes to defining the most interesting part about your company and idea is traction.

If you are asking yourself why traction is the most important thing about a company, then Mrs. Barrica already answered that during her informative speech. We all agree that entrepreneurs are very delusional people; they sometimes believe what their minds want, and follow their needs instead of their obligations and their musts, but with traction, we do not have to stay focused on what the entrepreneur says only, but we have got the numbers which are going to tell us everything; it is all proven in the numbers indeed, even if it is a foul on stage who bargains about things that seem ridiculous to the judges, they would keep listening because they have got all the numbers they need, which represents credibility.

Number two on the level of importance would be the team. The team is very important when it comes to the company, and as Mrs. Barrica stated, the history and deep experience of the team are very crucial to the success of both the pitch and the company.

The following thing would be deep tech, by this we mean that deep technology that the pitcher has when she of he starts pitching, which is something really rare to find in pitches according to Mrs. Barrica. Last but not least, number four on the level of importance is your vision.

If you are at the point where you do not have number 1, 2, and 3, then there are plenty of amazing vision pitches that you could opt for. However, the only negative thing about vision pitches when done is that the judges would know that you do not have traction, a good team, or a deep tech pitch.

https://vimeo.com/141908190