How to Create an Elevator Pitch - Masterclass by @cshipley #BizSpark

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Startup guru Chris Shipley preparing...
@Revaliente and myself is attending http://innovate100.com GStudio master class and final startup pitch slam in Zaragoza, Spain. An we are here because of Microsoft BizSpark and the Guidewire Group. Together with 24 other startups from US and Europe we shall compete for the global «Startup of the year» title.

An elevator pitch is a one minute speech with the objective of creating interest and even do some screening.

The pitch aims to make the listener remember:
  1. Your name
  2. Your company name
  3. Your 3 word mantra
As you know, you only have 20 seconds where the listener is concentrated and open. I choose to start like this:

Hi, I’m a General Ledger visionary.
To me i find it ridiculous to see professionals stuck in the old way of doing billing and accounting.
On internet, I call myself mortjac.
I also happen to be CEO and founder of iFacturas in Spain and Norway,
iFacturas provides financial apps on mobile and Facebook.

Chris Shipley, Guidewire Group, told us to use plenty of pauses, to make the important points stand out.

Quite difficult if you only has a minute to deliver the whole pitch!

According to Chris, and effective elevator pitch achieves these critical goals:
  1. Efficiently defines the market problem and/or opportunity
  2. Describes how you company addresses that opportunity
  3. Defines and conveyes the benefit to the target customer
  4. Anseres the question: why will you be successful.
Trying to address all this I turned it a bit around:

We are 7 persons working hard to enable professionals all around the world doing business without the old crap of PC, ink and paper.

Chris also asks us to develpe answeres to the following questions:
  1. What is my product or service?
  2. Who does my company serve?
  3. Why does the customer need or want my product?
  4. How big is the opportunity to serve this customer?
  5. Why is my company best suited to deliver this product or service?
  6. What is my competetive advantage?
  7. What proof do I have of customer need, market size, and competetivve advandtage?
I’m not even sure I got all this with me, but here the next paragraph:

We have released a Norwegian iPhone version in september and are on track to reach break even in Q2. We will release iPhone and WP7 in Spain in the coming weeks and on Facebook in Q1.

Last I finish when hinting at question 7 above:

We need investors to help us make the hockey stick growth steeper!

Just to assure you get the message, here is the graph from the Norwegian App Store downloads from week 37 and up to now. Not quite a hockey stick but still… So in order to increase the growth from 100% to many hundres we need investor capital and knowledge!


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