Getting Your Pitch Right 2

This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Andrea Barrica is a venture partner at 500 startups and the co-founder of inDinero and O.school, inDinero helps startups scale by offering cloud-based solutions to take care of accounting, tax and finance support. O.school helps people build sexual confidence through medically accurate videos, articles, and live streams. Andrea was at Startup Istanbul 2015 where she taught startups the best way to pitch their solutions.

During her session at Startup Istanbul 2015 where she trained startups on how to build a good pitch for their solution, Andrea listened to some of the startups do a trial pitch where she looked out for if the pitches were clear, boring, or well delivered. The pitching startups were also able to get first-hand feedback from members of the audience.

The first startup pitched a solution with the aim to make shopping 30 times faster, and make people save time that could have been unnecessarily wasted on shopping for other things, the solution helps customers use their vision to actually conduct shopping. The memorable thing about his pitch was the thing about using the eyes. But he gave his whole pitch in just 30 seconds, it important to take a pause when you say things that are big deals such as “we want to make shopping 30 times faster”, you can say “my name is Sam and I’m CEO of Hotel Laboratories and I want to make e-commerce 30 times faster”. This startup is a pre-launch startup, which is why it was best for him to pitch the idea of his vision.

Make sure you do not deliver the special things about your pitch too fast, save them for the best time to say them, and keep bringing up little things to refer to them through your pitch.

The second startup pitch talks about how 1.5 million cars are stolen every year because the existing vehicle security systems are outdated and car thieves have learned to bypass them, his startup provides a solution that is not subjected to the techniques used by thieves today. The market size is over $100 billion and his startup has received good feedback from car manufacturers and some other car business. It is a mobile app-based solution that is not subjected to hacking and does not compromise security.

His pitch received good applause from the audience, the pitch was clear enough to be remembered by some of the audience, but his business could not be easily understood by the audience. If an investor can not understand what you do, they are probably not going to invest in you. Therefore, the first rule of building any pitch is answering the question “is it clear after 30 seconds of pitching?”, you do not have to start with your personal profile while introducing. It is also very important to get a summary of what your business does in one line of a sentence and make sure your business can be understood from that one sentence.

https://youtu.be/TBi4z-i0Zto