What You Need to Get Your Pitch Right
This article is written by Amira Ibrahim, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
How to give the most interesting pitch in a startup event is what every entrepreneur wants to nail, in this session, Andrea Barrica will help all entrepreneurs to master their next pitch. The session was held during the amazing Startup Istanbul 2015. Andrea Barrica is a venture partner at 500 Startups, and an international pitch coach.
Andrea starts the session by highlighting the biggest problems entrepreneurs do while pitching:
They think that people are interested in them and the truth that they only care about the business.
Most entrepreneurs give a boring pitch that doesn’t grab people attention.
Most entrepreneurs don’t have an interesting idea to grab the attention of investors or judges.
Most judges don’t understand the core idea of the business.
The Four main things that make your business appealing to judges and investors:
Revenue
Revenue will validate your idea like nothing else. If you have revenue and key KPI’s this is considered the most important thing about your business, so you have to show it during your pitch right away. If you have a stable monthly growth rate (20-25%) for at least 3-4 months, you have to mention this, and you have to bring it up in the first slide of your presentation.
2. Team
Things that make the team attractive to investors and judges:
If some team members have previously started a business and executed it.
Deep domain experience and network experience especially tech companies.
Team members that have previous work experience in big brand names.
The team story that you present (Interesting and specific stories that are fun to listen to, about how your team started.)
3. Deep Tech
If your Startup has deep technical properties, you have to show this in your pitch but to be clear about this point this technology has to be unique and different. Also, your startup unique technology has to match with your team members skills, because if you are a deep-tech Startup but your team isn’t skilled enough! That will be a bad thing in the eyes of the judges
4. Vision
The Vision comes fourth in the order of importance, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good enough. If you don’t have any of the three things above but you have a great vision that is clear and interesting, your business will sure grab attention. Startup pitches that concentrate only on vision have a harder mission to grab judges and investor as their content have to be very good and very interesting and backed with facts, also it has to have something very useful for people.