Pitching your Startup

Last week, I felt like I was saying the same thing over and over again. And I was, because Storyberg was selected for the final interview day for Startmate.

After a quick focus talk from Pollenizer founder Mick Luibinskas, the 23 startups attending the day were allocated chairs around the room and the Startmate mentors would ask each startup why they should be chosen for the program. Each business had 10 minutes, one-on-one, to convince them to choose their startup.

Every interview began the same way:

“Let’s start with your one minute pitch”

Everyone you talk to about pitching says you need to get your elevator pitch down pat, and there’s no better way to do it than by repeating yourself 15 times in the one day.

Crafting your pitch

After a full day of pitching, my tips for the crafting your one minute pitch are the following:

1. Give context up front so your audience can relate to your space
2. Describe your value proposition
3. Describe the problem or current situation
4. Describe your solution
5. And lastly, describe the ‘aha’ moment your users will have

The Storyberg pitch

To bring it all together, here is our one minute pitch:

• Storyberg is a lean product management app
• We help de-risk innovation by making sure you’re building something people want
• Everyone knows about the lean startup methodology of build–measure–learn, but right now entrepreneurs either don’t have time to validate what their building or get confused in a mess of data from services like KISSmetrics and Google Analytics
• With Storyberg, in one online web app you can prioritise features, collaborate on development, release features and then we will validate your releases by allowing you to automatically track sign ups (traction) and how many users perform your key activity (engagement)
• So your team can do what they normally do and collaborate on features. Then two weeks after they release a feature we’ll come back and tell them ‘When this was released, sign ups were 10 and engagement was 15, now sign ups are 15 but engagement is down to 5, maybe you want to remove that feature? Or vice-versa depending on the analytics’

Practice your pitch

It doesn’t matter if your business is one day, one week or one year old, the best way to learn how to pitch is to pitch.

So … what’s your one minute pitch? Let know us on Twitter.