Venture Hacks

Watch the master pitch man, Steve Jobs, analyze the market for NeXT workstations in Part 1 of his Chalk Talk. He explains:

“Who is our target customer? Why are they selecting our products over our competiton’s? And what distribution channels are we going to use to reach these customers?”

Steve covers a handful of the slides that you see in a typical startup deck: Marketing, Sales, Competition, and a little bit of Problem and Solution. We should all strive to present with Steve’s clarity and simplicity.

Here’s part two of the video. Thanks to Daring Fireball for pointing me to this video.

Summary: If you’re having trouble writing an elevator pitch, try using bullets. And challenge yourself to keep the pitch under 100 words.

I received a cold call elevator pitch yesterday that was very effective. It was short (88 words not including the signature), the company had good traction, and the author used bullets to make his case (4 out of 5 bullets were about traction). Here it is (with the author’s permission):

Subject: Cold emai [sic]

Hi
A quick “cold email” to see if you would be interested in helping X raise money.

Our Story

• We are the the X of Y
• Over X Million registered users
• Growing at X new users per day
• Projecting growth at X new users per day in next X days
• Zero cost per customer acquisition

If you are interested please contact me 🙂

Thanks

The prose, spelling, and formatting could use a little work, but the pitch was brief and effective. I’m going to follow up with him.

Later that day, I was helping a client refine his elevator pitch. We were stuck on the prose so we decided to try bullets and it worked well. Here’s an example:

Subject: Introducing Ning to Blue Shirt Capital

Hi Nivi,

Thanks for offering to introduce us to Blue Shirt Capital. I’ve attached a short presentation about Ning. Here are some of the highlights:

• Ning lets you create your own social network for anything. For free. In 2 minutes. It’s as easy as starting a blog. Try it at http://ning.com
• We have over 115,000 user-created networks and our page views are growing 10% per week.
• We previously raised $44M from Legg Mason and others, including myself.
• Before Ning, I started Netscape (acquired by AOL for $4.2B) and Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6B).

We’re building Ning to unlock the great ideas from people all over the world who want to use this amazing medium in their lives.

I’ve admired Blue Shirt’s investments from afar. We’re starting meetings with investors next week and I would love to show Blue Shirt what we’re building at Ning.

Best,

Marc Andreessen
xyz@ning.com
415.555.1212

Not bad. But at 158 words (not including the signature) it’s almost twice the size of the cold call I received today. Compare this Ning pitch to Ning’s pitch without bullets. Which one do you like better?

John Manoogian sent me this great trailer for The Player, a satire of the movie making system in Hollywood:

(Link: The Player)

Silicon Valley is the Hollywood of startups.

Business plans are scripts, entrepreneurs are writers, engineers are talent, VCs are studios, angels are independent financiers, recruiters are casting agents, lawyers are lawyers, advisors are agents, points are options, TechCrunch is Variety, and so on.

What analogies am I missing?

I want to give Pinch Media a shout-out for mentioning our post on high concept pitches in their funding announcement. Their pitch is,

“FeedBurner for iPhone developers.”

Can they shorten it even further? “FeedBurner for iPhones”?

I wonder if they used our other hacks too when they negotiated their deal with Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital. (Mobile analytics must be picking up steam; Motally just joined Venture Hacks—they “track and report usage statistics across mobile websites.”)

Some people think high concept pitches are too simple. I agree, they are too simple—that’s the point. They’re the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.

There are too many startups vying for too little attention. You simply won’t have the opportunity to tell your whole story at once. A high concept pitch is a meme that you use to capture some attention, so you have the chance to tell the rest of your story.

Marc Hustvedt, an angel investor on Venture Hacks, calls the high concept pitch a “Hollywood pitch”. I like it. “Hollywood pitch” is shorter and more concrete. Which one do you prefer?

Anthony Stevens read our article on high concept pitches and decided to write a high concept pitch for his startup:

“So, let’s see: my startup is Crowdify, a tool for brand and reputation managers to discover new insights into consumers’ attitudes about their subjects and make better decisions about marketing and public relations strategy. We do this through semantic analysis applied to consumer-generated correlations among and between brands and reference data. Further, we utilize social-networking metaphors to keep interesting information flowing back and forth between branding people and the consuming public.”

Most elevator pitches look like this: long, boring, senseless, and ineffective. You probably stopped reading after the first sentence. Or the pitch looked so long you didn’t read it at all.

Fortunately, Anthony came to same conclusion:

“That’s a little wordy, especially for a business card, so let’s try a little high-concept pitch development. Hmm… relations that people will understand. “A for B”, where A is a known brand in my space, and B is the target audience… how about:

Facebook for Brands

“I think I like it! Not least of which is the rumor floating around today that Facebook is about to be acquired by Microsoft for something like 15 to 20 billion dollars.”

I like it too. Anthony started with a long paragraph that actually hurt him more than it helped. Then he turned it into a high concept pitch that opens the door to a conversation about his company.