Jason Calacanis’ most recent post to his email mailing list is particularly relevant to our audience. He’s spoken with 200 companies in ten minute increments as they give their pitch to be a part of the upcoming TechCrunch50 conference. I agree with all of his thoughts below based on my own experience getting pitched from thousands of startups over the last three years. If you are pitching a company to the press, a conference, a potential employee or an investor, bookmark this. You’ll be glad you did.
The best chance for success of course is to have a killer product to show. In which case it doesn’t really matter if you show up late to the call and do it from a cell phone while sitting in an underground parking garage with the music playing. But on the margin advice like this is hugely valuable because it helps the listener understand exactly what your product is, and how clearly you understand the challenges ahead of you.
The full text of Jason’s email is below. You can request to join the mailing list here.
For the past 10 days I’ve sat through 200 company demos for the TechCrunch50 conference. These demos are mostly done over the phone for 10 minutes using the phone and web conferencing software like WebEx or Adobe’s wonderful new “Connect” service.
After doing 2,500 minutes of demos (40 hours) this year and many more last year for the conference, I’ve learned a lot about what makes for a great demo and what makes for a horrible demo. Since demoing your idea is a key to your success as an entrepreneur, I thought I would share everything I know in a few simple bullet points.
These tips are applicable to presenting in front of an investor, a partner as well as a demo style conference. Of course, every situation is different so consider these loose guidelines.
Background: The TechCrunch50 conference is taking places on September 8-10th in San Francisco and you can find more information here: www.techcrunch50.com. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.com and I started the event last year as a place where fifty startup companies could launch their products without having to pay a fee (i.e. the incumbent conference called DEMO charges $18,500 to launch a startup company–that’s really low/abusive in my book). Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Sequoia Capital and a bunch of other fine partners have joined us in hosting the event.
1. Show your product within the first 60 seconds
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Most folks start their presentations with information like the size of the market they are tackling (tens of billions, we only need 1%!), their inflated corporate bios, the philosophical approach they’re
taking, and boring Powerpoint graphics explaining some convoluted workflow of their product.
The longer it takes for you to show your product, the worse your product is. Folks who have a kick-ass product don’t spend five or ten minutes “setting the stage” or “giving the background.” Folks with killer products CAN’T WAIT to show you their product. Their demos start with their homepage and quickly jump into the users experience. If a picture tells a thousand stories, then a product demo tells a million.
Show your product immediately, and if you don’t have a product to show don’t take the meeting.
2. The best products take less than five minutes to demo
——————————————-
The greatest tech products over the past 10 years would take no more than five minutes each to demo. For example:
a) Larry and Sergey could demo Google search in less than five minutes. Here’s a box, type something in and you get a huge reward.
b) Steve Jobs could demo the iPod in less than five minutes. Plug it in, put in your CDs and it syncs your music. Turn it on and use the wheel to select what songs you want to listen to.
c) Chris DeWolfe could demo MySpace in less than five minutes. Sign up, fill out your profile, and add your friends. For bonus points add some widgets to your page.
I think you get the idea: the better the product the LESS time it takes to demo. If your product demo takes more than five minutes to demo, it probably sucks. All the tiny little features that matter to
you are of course important–God is in the details–however, when presenting your company, you don’t have to show them. Larry and Sergey wouldn’t open up the advanced search tab and the list of operators you can use in Google during a demo.
Steve Jobs does take the demo details to a fairly detailed level, but you and I are not Steve Jobs. There is only one Steve Jobs and there is only one Apple. You’re never going to build something as cool as Steve, and as such there is no need for you to talk about your product for five or ten minutes.
3. Leave people wanting more.
——————————————-
If you take my advice in point two, then folks should be either blown away or intrigued by your core product. If they are not somewhere in that spectrum, you need to rebuild your core product.
When I pitched Mahalo to investors, I had five sheets of paper with different search results on each. I put them on a table and said which one is the best. Obviously I knew my result was the best, and that
simple demonstration lead to MASSIVE discussion: how was the page built? how long did it take to build? what would it cost to make that page? how often do you need to update it? how can you scale that business? how many pages can you create before it breaks even?
It’s best for folks to discover the merits of your product for themselves, and it’s up to you to make such a compelling core product that they are intrigued enough to explore it.
4. Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do.
——————————————-
Weak startups and their leaders seem to immediately start talk about “what’s next,” as opposed to focusing on the core product. Anyone can say we’re going to add: a mobile version, collaborative filtering, an advertising network, visualizations, a marketplace, a browser plugin, a browser and a social network to their product. In fact, given the amount of open source and off the shelf software out there, combined with the large number of developers in the world, anyone can bolt these things on to their service in a week or three.
Who cares what you’re going to bolt on to your startup? What really matters is the core functionality of your startup.
Steve Jobs has become at once the world’s greatest salesman and product developer because he only announces Apple’s achievements. He doesn’t waste time on what Apple’s going to do: he talks about the here and now. Microsoft’s old strategy was to talk about products that were coming and that put them in the horrible position of having to backpedal when they changed their mind about a product.
5. Understand your competitive landscape–current and historical.
——————————————-
This year I’ve had three companies show me group SMS messaging products, and most of them did not know what UPOC.com was (Gordon Gould’s group SMS messaging service that was five years ahead of its time). I’ve had three or four companies over the past two years of TechCrunch50 conferences pitch me on Third Voice–the controversial “web annotation” service from Web 1.0. [Side note: I loved the concept of Third Voice so much I considered starting a company like it and even bought the domain name annotated.com.]
When I pitched the idea for Weblogs, Inc. to Mark Cuban, Yossi Vardi and Jeff Bezos, I understood all the niche email marketing and newsletter companies from the early and mid-nineties cold. I researched why they worked and why they failed, and I knew which ones were sold and bought and by whom. When I pitched Mahalo to Sequoia Capital, I knew the history of human-powered search and directories from DMOZ to Yahoo Directory to LookSmart.
If you don’t know the competitive landscape, and the shoulder’s you’re standing on, folks are not going to be comfortable giving you their money, time or attention.
6. Short answers are best.
——————————————-
When taking questions about your product answer questions shortly. This is a very challenging thing for many people–including myself–to do. If you’re like me, you’ve probably thought out your startup’s
issues a thousand different ways. When I sit at the poker table I play a game where I think out every possible scenario for not only my hands, but the hands of my opponents (this is fairly standard among
advanced poker players from what I understand).
Say I have Ace King and I raised out of position and the button called my raise pre-flop. Then they re-raised me on the flop, which had an Ace. What does that tell me? They could have an ace, they could have two aces and have slow played me, they could have a medium pocket pair and they want to see if I have an ace, maybe they are on a flush or straight draw or maybe they suck at poker. Who the hell knows?!?! You can go insane trying to figure all these things out–that’s why poker
becomes very addictive.
The point is all that inner thinking is chaos when you try to explain it to another person. It’s pure madness after 60 seconds of talking. The best thing to do is answer the question with the most concise answer. For example, when asked “what happens if Google enters your market?” answer quickly and with confidence:
a) Google has entered many markets, but they are only #1 in search and search advertising. They trail in social networking to MySpace and Facebook, in classifieds to Craigslist, in news to Yahoo and AOL, in email to Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo, and in instant messaging to Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo.
b) We’re not sure if Google will enter our market, but hopefully we’ll have developed our product enough that it will be a real sustainable business by that time.
c) We think Google might enter our market at some point, and if they do they and their competitors will certainly consider buying us–creating a bidding war for our entrenched position.
d) Google is a very big company right now with a very big cash machine that they have to focus on and protect–they will never do our business with our level of focus. We will out execute them on all
fronts.
These are all amazing answers (I did, after all, come up with them), and you can say them in around a minute. However, if you cram all four of these sentences together you’ve spoken for five minutes.
7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death
——————————————-
Do not make slide after slide explaining your business in bullet points, because it’s really, really boring. Powerpoint/Keynote slides that are not boring include charts, product shots, feature set tables
and the like. Things that explain big concepts with ease and grace are great, but bullet points of obvious facts show that:
a) you don’t have the ability to create a compelling story with data
b) you don’t think that much of the person being presented the information
I’m not a huge fan of “funny slides” or lots of graphics for graphics sake. You’re not pitching your company to get laughs–unless you’re on stage–you’re doing it to raise capital, close a partnership or get on stage at a conference. Keep it focused and to the point.
8. How to use this new device called the phone.
——————————————-
When presenting over the phone use a handset and a land-line… only!
It’s amazing to me that any person doing a business call would conduct it on their mobile phone. Mobile phones sound horrible 95% of the time, and they frequently cut out. If you are presenting your company take it seriously and get yourself to a landline. You have limited time and don’t want folks to miss a single word.
Speakerphones are horrible, and putting the person receiving the demo on speaker phone during a demo is just disrespectful. You can hear all the rustling, side conversations and horrible echos when you’re on speaker phone. When doing a demo pick up the handset and speak. If you go to a Q&A session then use speaker phone. That’s why it exists.
Only use a headset if it is very, very high-fidelity and you have the microphone right up to your mouth. Also, don’t eat, drink or breath heavy into the microphone or you run the risk of sounding like an animal. I use an amazing Plantronics headset, and I like me some Green Matcha tea, but I hit the mute key when I sip!
I know it sounds crazy to have a discussion about how to use the phone, but the majority of these young people actually think it’s acceptable to have two or three drop offs in a call–it’s not. Grow up
and get a land line.
9. How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to
——————————————-
After you do your concise presentation you’re hopefully going to get a lot of questions. Here are some important tips to consider when you don’t know the answer cold:
a) take a moment to think about the question. You can even say “Hmmm… that’s a good question. Let me think about that for a second.” Folks appreciate a little consideration when someone takes a
question.
b) if you don’t have an answer be honest and say you don’t. There are many ways to say this including: “I’m not really sure, I’m going to have to think about that for a bit and get back to you,” or “I’m not sure to be honest. What do you think?”
c) feel free to think out loud and brainstorm with the person. You can do this by saying “I’ve never really considered that. Perhaps you can expand the question a little and we can explore it right now.”
d) if you’re not sure of the answer you can always say you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it. “I’m not sure how we would deal with a sudden spike in the cost of bandwidth, we would have to collect more information and answer that question down the road. It is a manageable risk factor I suppose. ”
The worst thing to do when you don’t have an answer is b.s. the person. No one has an answer for everything, except a b.s. artists. So, feel free to say you don’t know–folks find it refreshingly humble
and honest.
10. Always confirm the time of your meeting/call, and always be 15
minutes early.
——————————————-
People are really busy and meetings get mixed up. Every meeting or phone call I do is confirmed twice: once by email, and once on the day before the meeting. Reconfirming meetings makes you look like a true player and it costs you nothing. You do this by sending a simple email saying “Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at your offices at 123 Main Street at 3pm. If anything changes you can reach me on my mobile at 310-555-1212.”
Also, be early. Come on. If you’re doing a meeting with someone who might invest in your company, do a business deal with you, etc., you can show a lot of respect by being in their lobby or on hold on the conference call five to 15 minutes ahead of time. Don’t show up more than 15 minutes ahead of time or you’ll look like a stalker. If you get to your meeting 45 minutes ahead of time go to the Starbucks and buy yourself a treat for being so on top of things. 
What are your best tips for giving a proper demo of your company on the phone or in person?
In your mind, what are the worst things folks have done during a presentation?
11. Practice. Practice. Practice.
12. Work out for an hour. Just make sure you are done one hour prior to your demo time. You will feel better, relax and ready to rock and roll.
Jason, you gotta it wrong about google. they’re also #1 in online videos with youtube.
Just the opposite, it proves his point. Youtube was entrenched when google entered with their google video app, and in the end youtube got its payday when google realized it will never overtake it through internal development.
Actually, I think you just proved Jason’s point. Google were NOT #1 in video, they became so by purchasing YouTube.
“c) We think Google might enter our market at some point, and if they do they and their competitors will certainly consider buying us–creating a bidding war for our entrenched position.”
@an idiot
actually, he got it right, because the point he was trying to make is that Google often doesn’t get to #1 organically, but must get there via acquisition, as happened with youtube.
#1 of video what? streams? #1 at losing money on online video should be the title… i think they’re burn rate is now at what $500M?
yeah how about i start a service and call it YourPower.com and I pay for everyones electrical service. Free electricity…democrotizing electricity… maybe google will buy and fuel that one too and be #1 of online power
doh! that post was form a year ago
Very interesting & thoughtful points ..
Love it.
Talk slowly… If you’re a fast thinker (and speaker), you don’t want to overwhelm your audience:)
By the way Michael,
When will Techcrunch notify who of all the 900 submittet to TC50 that are out? Will the 50 be selected by monday as promised? Please, please update the TC50 blog on such stuff…
This is why I like techcrunch. With all their commercial considerations, they still have such posts that is core to startups.
I have a counterpoint to the ’straight to the demo’ principle. There are some products that don’t lend themselves very well for simple demos. Say a CRM product, or a back-office product, for example, an add on exchange or sharepoint.
Didn’t Jason say that he was gonna sue anyone who reposts his stuff? I think he issued a DMCA to some guy already.
Jason, Thanks for writing such wonderful article that covers nearly every aspect for an Entrepreneur to demo his startup.
The startup presentations will be so much more successful with these golden nuggets !
Great post. Re: #7, I’ve found Presentation Zen to be an invaluable resource. A must-read for anyone constructing a deck…
Thanks for the tip, Jon!
7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death
=======================
very good point
i hate PowerPoint , i like to see a new presentation ways
example: Sony did a good presentation in E3 by using littlebigplanet
how do i get from new orleans to sf with no money..ok get a loan..wait my credit is bad. how about i just don’t make it and lose out on a major opportunity all because of location. Why don’t yall test how popular you really are and come down to new orleans and Throw a Techcrunch convention Party edition in New orleans. You will find out how nerds really party in down here.
I love TechCrunch. I asked my entire team to subscribe and we discuss daily. Great post – much appreciated.
Each time I prepare to go before investors an angel comes in and I never have to pitch. This post helps alleviate a little anxiety for that time when I might have to…
Thanks
Is it true that you will not allow any of the those applying to be on the TechCrunch 50 to promote their startups on other blogs or social media beforehand?
http://scobleiz...of-no-startups/
If so, you may actually be keeping them from a valuable learning experience, as well as getting initial reactions from thousands of people.
There is also an ethical consideration. Techcrunch has become a major force, but for those of us who have been reading since the first month – we hope you stay humble
Jesus! Are you kidding me?
…Show your product immediately, and if you don’t have a product to show don’t take the meeting….
This was a great line. However. I don’t recall anything after this because I have ADD.
get real big guy!
Jason – you are wrong about Myspace, it doesn’t take 5 minutes to pitch them.
I have known them for years, still I have no clue what the hell is this thing, and who wants to use it.
Give me a 5 hours pitch, I’de still be confused.
“PowerPoint bullet slides are death”
I would totally agree.
Nice! I can definitely use this valuable advise for my upcoming demos.
Also, I am wondering: do a lot of people demo their product by playing screencasts? When you product is still buggy and in early stage I can imagine that might be a safe way of doing it. But on the other hand it might show that you’re not confident about your product :] (Or that you rigged the demo haha)
Thanks!
Very nice post indeed!
Everyone says they like short demos – but if you are finished early this typically leaves a BAD impression. Finish just on time.
What are your thoughts about this?
yeah, no. When you finish early it’s usually because the person you are pitching isn’t stopping you to ask questions, jump around etc. If they aren’t throwing you off track, they’re just listening politely until you stop talking.
Michael:
When will you notify all the companies which did not make it to TechCrunch50? And the reasons for not selected.
Milan
Hi,
one of the main sentence is “if you don’t have a product to show don’t take the meeting”.
I have an idea for a web business. I made a specification and know how I want it to look like. But I am neither a web designer nor a web developer. I asked some reliable companies and they estimate the development cost to be about 100.000$ and 6 months.
I am very confident, it can be successful, I can present the idea and it benefits in 5 minutes. But I can not show a product, because I am just a student and dont have that money to invest. So I would like to present to investors, but really struggle in how to contact them and what to do, if I can not show a working product.
And I have no idea, what an investors gets, if he gives you money to start your start-up? How much of the company belongs to him, which rights does he get? Can you recommend any articles about those topics to me?
Thanks!
Hey Mike, help Marc here, he really needs help !
Wow, you sound like me about 2 years ago. Just dive in man, find and read blogs about these topics you need information on. Locate books as well. Use more of the Internet than you could ever imagine yourself using (try and kill your idea). If you have passion and a will, there may be a way.
I started in Iowa with an idea, I didn’t know anything about the web really. After 6 months I just moved to San Francisco and 18 months later I’m living in Manila getting ready to launch within the next 6 weeks.
If you can’t get your idea on the web and time begins to pass…just evolve your product with the changes in the market.
Good luck!
You have to dive in…learn whatever it takes
I was a management consultant, wanted to make Kreeo.com, didn’t have enough funds to hire a team.
To cut costs I first learnt AJAX, HTML, CSS, PHP, Linux, XML, Apache and developed a AJAX framework and platform architecture from scratch.
Then I mentored fresh engineers in a training institute and created my team of X-men…
Don’t let the passion die!
Hey Ryan, I’m also in Manila finishing off some development for our new software start-up. We should meet up, contact me on the site http://www.jakaya.com
All the best,
John
You have to make it happen. Ideas by themselves aren’t going to get you anywhere. If you don’t have the ability to build it yourself, and you can’t afford to pay someone to build it for you, then you need to figure something else out. Pare down the idea, get a second job, take out a loan, find a good offshore company, learn a rapid dev platform like Rails/Drupal/Plone, etc. If you’re already stalled out, then you aren’t presenting a good case for VCs to invest in. You need to prove you can overcome those odds.
Marc,
First advice: don’t go to a “reliable company” to build your product — instead, find a Web developer you can trust and get him as your partner. First of all, a couple founders will have it a much easier time to find funding than a solo one.
Second, this partner should be able to create the most important parts of your application, so you will have to show to investors. You don’t need a feature complete application, all you need is the core functionality which shows the main point of the application.
And third, when you outsource the application which all your business is based upon, you become the slave of the company that created it. If you develop it in-house from day one, you will be able to change directions and experiment whenever you need.
And yes, if you can spare 30 bucks make sure to read this and this.
Hi Marc, I am exactly in your shoes. To make it worse, I am in Nigeria where there is no Silicon Valley even a thousand miles away. Because of the business idea I have and believe in so much, this fall, I intend attending Univ. of Warwick for my masters. The best way is to find a techie partner, preferably a graduate student who can take your project to the Alpha stage before thinking of spending 100 grand on anything. I came across this yesterday. It will be very valuable. http://paulgrah....com/start.html
Oo
I am based down the road from Warwick University, and in fact may take office space there, give me a shout should you need any help. Find my details on our temporary website.
outsource it to me at half the price.
marc,
consider taking on a partner. someone that can help take your idea further.
instead of learning technology and putting a bunch of money into prototyping, get better at judging people’s technical abilities and being able to get that one person on board, even if it part time.
as the person with the idea, you should be able to sell the idea to someone that understands development in return for a couple of weekends.
you’ll be surprised at how a product changes once you start implementing it.
even if it doesn’t work out, you’ll end up with excellent learning experience that will be useful in the future.
good luck
The best thing for your situation in my experience is to contact an early stage incubator like ycombinator http://www.ycombinator.com or Recon Labs http://www.reconlabs.com and pitch them on your idea.
I do agree with most of the views, but a handful of them (like the disliking of bulleted points on a PPT) are subjective, and good to be ignored. Exception: Use those views when you demo for TechCrunch
i personally have no problem with bulleted points, but I think Jason is saying that a lot of text that you are just reading makes it hard to keep people’s attention.
if you’re going to say something and its also a bullet, you’re really advertising that particular point.
if everything you say is advertised, folks will just scan your PPT for content and ignore what you’re saying.
IMHO: a good way to keep track of your talking points is via the ‘notes’ section that exists under every PPT slide.
Very simple rule for PowerPoints, if you are going to use them.
Rule: 7±2 = Use 7 bullet points + or – 2.
That means use 5 to 9 bullet points.
More than 9 bullet points, then split them into 2 slides.
Guy Kawasaki refers to the 10-20-30 rule when at Stanford:
http://www.yout...h?v=liQLdRk0Ziw
Know your audience. Know your stuff. Be yourself.
Be prepared for last-minute agenda changes. With TC50, we read every FAQ and prepared for our TEN minute demo as requested. Then when the call came, the lead-in said “it will be a FIVE minute demo with five minutes of Q&A”.
Nice curve ball. We should have been prepared. We prepared about eight minutes of material, and had to quickly cut out almost 40% of it. VERY tough!
If the *demo* was meant to be 10 minutes, this was unfair to the presenter and to the potential investors. I take the point that consumer-grade mass-appeal products such as the iPhone or Google can be demoed in 5 minutes, the next Oracle-beater or new programming language probably can’t be demoed in 5 minutes.
Exciting as well as important points….
Point number one is the hardest for me to be brief on.
Most of the time I feel like I have to educate my client about what the product is, before I can pitch them on how it would benefit them – and, I have a big list of ‘the next upgrade’ in my presentation. :-/
I seem that I’m preparing for my next presentations kind of backwards again – glad I read this! Many thanks for sharing something I can put to use today!
“In your mind, what are the worst things folks have done during a presentation?”
Find out about the buyer of the tech first. Then cater your solution to their product.
“My product will fit into your product such as X, Y, Z and improve your offering by R, T, S.”
“I can license this to you in D, E, F cost effective way”
Sorry, that quote was misplaced. Those are things winning startups do.
“In your mind, what are the worst things folks have done during a presentation?”
The only bad thing you can do is to have a useless product. As you stated you can be annoying, stupid, a redneck, vomit on the buyers, ect…
As long as you have the goods, you’ll sell.
Compare and contrast how it used to be when I was a boy:
http://dougandlydia.com/demos
I wrote these notes for our chaps out on the road demoing prototypes of enterprise software – many years ago.
If they aren’t throwing you off track, they’re just listening politely until you stop talking.
never apologize on stage.
.~.
do jumping jacks, or stretching exercises before – but not right before, so you’re not winded – but energized and loose.
Can you recommend any articles about those topics to me?
Drink REDBULL before giving presentation !!!
As you mention being early to a demo, to show respect, looking good is important too. I have seen people looking like they just came out of a party at 5 am and did not have time to change. For once, be respectful and put some nice clothes on. It can make a difference with other people.
Most of the time the people who goes to show off their company do not know well enough who they are talking to. They should do at least a little background check when they know who will attend the demo, at least for the big names.
I disagree with the bullet point comment. Please people do not ‘read’ all the time. If a little bullet point summary helps then go for it, if it does not, do not use it, but don’t read and look at your audience.
So, what is the point of Jason “retiring” if his “posts” keep getting distributed all over the web? How does that work?
He’s got one major point wrong. Many start-ups have very exciting, important and interesting features coming. You sometimes have to get “nuts and bolts” things done before getting to the fancy stuff. Having built products that are vastly more successful anything he has ever done I’d hate to leave this point unanswered because it’s silly. Jason is a content guy NOT a tech/software/Internet guy — sorry if anyone thinks otherwise but mahalo is the antithesis of a “tech” product. It’s a bunch of pages with a bunch of manually placed links.
@Dominiek. Of course you rig your demo. Pick the path of highest impact, closest to your main feature, and make sure that works. That’s covered by point 2: you don’t want to bore your audience discussing every feature, just the ‘wow’ ones. If it’s still got bugs in it, drop in a static page – you’re demonstrating a feature, not discussing bugs. If you can’t get it fixed before launch, then you never had a product in the first place.
hi Jason,
very nice article. I loved it.
Thanks for devoting time for this useful article and sharing with all.
- Suresh
http://www.realgroup.co.in
I’m always early, for every business meeting – you never know with traffic. Some people always try and say that I’m obviously not busy enough – you have to always be late, always rushing, always brushing people off, if you’re really busy, apparently. They obviously haven’t learnt about personal respect, politeness, preparedness, etc. Glad to see some people notice.
fantastic..Thanks a lot for all the effort you have put in writing this.
i always thought in valley it was who you know equal success
i doubt this has changed
majority of new start ups are ex google guys/gals
Excellent tips, I think this is right on the mark.
Alex
Thanks for the positive comments.
Dave: RE: the DMCA complaint, I say in my email if you want to republish my emails please ask. After it comes out a couple of people ask and I one or two permission (if it’s an email I don’t mind sharing publicly).
The DMCA was sent to folks creating anonymous accounts as “Jason’s blog” and slapping ads around them. Obviously I’m trying something different with my newsletter and the point of it isn’t to let folks republish it everywhere on the web–automatically in fact–without permission.
Since Mike and I are partners on the TechCrunch50 event I’m going to give him permission to reprint my work if he wants.
all the best,
Jason
That’s a bunch of crap. When you presented Mahalo, it was not just about the search results. It was – Who was behind the company presenting it?
Mahalo presented by some unknown would not have gotten 1/10th of its funding.
So please, take that crappy argument about winning ove rinvestors with a superior product out. or Mahalo isn’t what the web needs. There are too many like it doing the same thing and better.
I’d have to agree – if it was an unknown presenting the exact same concept…well, the turnout would probably be no funding
and
it’s all about ex-googlers, yahoos, etc that these vc people will reply to – and top ivy leaugers
Nice points… on the topic of slides, a colleague of mine from MAYA Design wrote this article that I think still has some good advice:
Evil Genius (The Good Side of PowerPoint)
http://www.maya...e-of-powerpoint
Great post and relevant for all demos whether startup or not.
This post seems to make sense, but it’s horse poo. Vastly oversimplified.
Just because you say something with force and gravitas, that doesn’t make it some universl truth.
IFor example, I demo to academics, whose amygdala’a are on fight or flight mode. My five minute conceptual introduction opens the switch and allows me access the the higher parts of their minds.
If I don’t do this, I look like anothar smarmaster from some suit-and-tie corporation.
So ease off on the ego a bit, Mr Ed.
The worst presentations I’ve seen also revolve around Q&A: the presenters take the tough questions too seriously.
I always say, if you’ve invited tough questions, the presentation was a huge success. You’ve gotten people thinking critically about what you’re saying. Just be chill with the questions, and you’ll end on a high note.
I agree that no questions is a bad sign, and that tough questions can mean that you’ve hooked your audience. But some tough questions are still meant to evaluate someone, especially if they are asked early in the presentation. We get a several idea/product pitches a month, and sometimes I ask tough questions to see if they’ve thought things through. If they’re clueless about market, budget, finances, experience, etc. or answer every tough question with “that doesn’t matter, we’re gonna be rich, I tell you, rich!” then it doesn’t necessarily bode well. Then again, we’re not VCs (we build web sites), so the types of questions I ask aren’t necessarily the same as those TC or VCs ask.
Great post — as someone that has pitched, and now gets pitched, new ideas, this is a post that should be taped to the wall of every entrepreneur, budding entrepreneur, and wannabe.
One thing I’d add — be open to hearing the hard things. Too often entrepreneurs (I include me in this) get so into their products that they lose sight of where their product fits in — being open to hearing the hard things about your product allows you to create a much better product down the road!
Can we get a post on how to execute your release? A lot of start-ups have problems executing a great business.
Information is wealth, Iam sure every newbie who read this article gained some wealth.
Thanks