Elevator Pitch 101: How to Create a Great 1 Minute Pitch

Hey everybody, welcome to the Startup Idea Pitch Practice event. I'm really glad you were able to join us today. We had almost 1,000 people registered to this event and we didn't do a formal count of how many countries, but I would bet a lot of money that it's probably more than 50 or 60 countries. So a great international audience. Let us know where you're joining in from in the chat here. I already see that Elvin is, uh, was writing us from Liberia. Welcome, Elvin. I see Vincent from Boston, Ahmad from Zambia, Jesu from Luxembourg, Denmark, Bristol, uh, Colombia. This is awesome. A quick thing on the elevator pitch. So we got 5 minutes. All right, if you have not already downloaded the worksheet, there it is again. We just threw it into the chat. See, my team reads their mind. I have an amazing team. Bit.ly/fi-elevatorpitch. Okay, download that worksheet because that is the format, the structure, uh, that we will use for this, uh, pitch today. Without structure, there is chaos, right? So let me get really quick to, uh, what the goals of the elevator pitch are. Just from my experience working with, honestly, at this point, probably 100,000 entrepreneurs— it makes me feel old— But the majority of people, when they first started, first start doing an elevator pitch, they have an attitude of like, oh, I want to impress people with my pitch so they think that I'm smart. Now, you may not think that intrinsically, but if you're using a lot of buzzwords and you're trying to use technical terms and stuff, then literally you are trying to make yourself sound smart when what you really need to be doing is establishing an immediate understanding. So that more fruitful conversation can follow. And we're all going to go into these tables in a moment, right? And I'm sure you're going to hear some pitches from people, and a lot of the mentors are probably going to be spending a bunch of time just trying to understand what it is that this founder is trying to do because they're not being clear. They're using buzzwords, they're using terms that maybe they don't understand. All of that time trying to understand what they're doing is time that they're not actually getting feedback. Okay, you need to speak as plainly as possible. All right, it's not about impressing people. Anybody can use big terms and stuff. The people that are successful are the people that can take very complicated things and make it simple, right? Albert Einstein said, if you can't explain it simply, then you don't understand it well enough. The second, uh, goal of the elevator pitch is, um, And this is the big thing that I see is that a lot of founders see it as almost like, okay, I'm going to get into a debate club here and you're going to give me a reason why my idea won't work and I'm going to counter and I'm going to, I'm going to show you that my idea will work, right? But again, when you are pitching your elevator pitch, it's, it's not just to get an immediate understanding and maybe to start building connections. It's to collect as much feedback as possible. Every second that you spend speaking is a second that the person that you're pitching to is not speaking, and that is valuable feedback, okay? Even if you completely disagree with somebody you're saying, all right, just, just take the feedback. That is value, all right? Because you know what, maybe you don't believe what they're saying, maybe you think they're an idiot, but maybe, uh, tomorrow you pitch to other people and they see the same thing, you're like, all right, well, maybe that person's not an idiot. Right? You don't, you don't know what you don't know as an entrepreneur. So don't offend your idea. Collect as much feedback as possible because the value of any idea, it's not in the idea itself. It's not in this light bulb. It's in the evolution of that idea over time in response to market and, and feedback. So what we have here is the elevator pitch template. Okay. And I think this picture is a little bit pixelated. I need to fix that. But essentially you can download a high-res version of it at bit.ly/fi-elevatorpitch. And we're trying to make this as simple as possible. We took an approach here, Mad Libs. I don't know, I'm kind of dating myself, but when I was a kid, I had all these little Mad Libs workbooks and I would, you know, I put in random words and it would create this funny story, right? We're trying to do the same thing here where we want you to describe your business in a clear and concise manner. My company, company name, or if you don't have a company, whatever, just say my, my project, my idea, right? I'm developing something, a defined offering to help a defined audience solve a problem. And I'm trying to do this in some unique way, shape, or form. Um, what a lot of people will ask when it comes to businesses as well is why now? Timing is incredibly important. There's no shortage of businesses that have been started too early or too late. Why you? Why are you or your team the right people to do the business? And what is your ask? So let me get into these 4 things very quickly and then we will go back into the room so you can start getting feedback. So the offering, keep it simple, right? Speak plainly. Don't tell me it's a platform. What is that? Is that a wooden thing that I can go stand on over there? Or is it actually, what are you trying to say? It's an e-commerce website or a mobile app. Okay, speak simply. If you think about just sentence structure, if you say something in your third word of a sentence that confuses somebody, every other word after that is gonna compute— is they're still gonna be thinking about that third word that confused them, right? Speak simply. So don't say a platform, say an e-commerce website. Don't say an AI-assisted hiring engine, right? Just say, okay, it's a subscription service. The second thing is the audience. So a lot of, one of the biggest issues that people will have here is that just use very benign or just large terms, right? Don't tell me that your audience is women. That's roughly the half of the women, the half of the population of the planet, right? Not exactly defining your audience there. And don't also tell me that your audience is a small business. You don't sell a small business, right? So for anybody here, in attendance that's trying to build a B2B product, you have to drill down into the specific person at a business whose KPIs align with the product that you are building, right? So telling me you sell to a small business is completely useless. Telling me that you sell to an HR manager at software companies in France or something like that is much more useful. The third thing is, okay, what problem are you trying to solve? If you're not trying to solve a problem for a customer, then to be honest, you, you kind of already lost. Okay, at the most basic thing, a startup solves a problem for a customer. And you know what, nobody wakes up in the morning thinking— they don't wake up saying, I want to utilize AI and machine learning to surface diamonds in the rough, right? And this is a term, or It's something along these lines that we'll usually see, right? So if we go back to this last example where it's an HR manager at a software company in France, they're not waking up and saying, I want to utilize AI and machine learning to surface diamond in the rough. They're probably waking up saying, I want to quickly find the best engineering candidates to hire, right? Speak plainly and speak to the actual problems that the customer has and resist the urge to loop in your solution. Right. That's what this left example here is meant to describe. Way too many people loop in their solution when describing the problem. That's not the problem. That's not what people wake up worrying about. We have enough problems that we have in our lives where we don't wake up thinking, I need to utilize AI and machine learning to surface diamonds in the rough. Right. The secret sauce is Another word for unique value proposition, differentiator, but basically that is what makes you unique and ideally what makes your results unique. So again, speak plainly and talk about why what you're doing is probably unique and why you think that this is something that can just have impact versus everything else on the market. The why now. So as I mentioned before, timing can make or break a company. Most, uh, humble entrepreneurs will very much acknowledge that timing and luck were a very large part of their success. All right, there were plenty of Googles before Google, there were plenty of YouTubes before YouTube, right? It was just a confluence of, of factors at that point, whether it was broadband or whatever that came to play, where this idea was just perfect for this point in time. All right, um, that is something that you definitely want to look at. And then finally, great companies start with great people. This is one of the founding principles of the Founder Institute. This is why we use social science admissions, uh, as our main form of admissions in the Founder Institute programs, because it is the people that create the value. So why are you or your team the right people to execute on this? And finally, the ask. If you aren't asking for something every time you talk about your business, you're failing, okay? Because every single person, it doesn't matter what your impression of them is or whatever, they're a potential connector, okay? They may know somebody who even may know somebody who may know somebody, um, but at the very least, they're a source of feedback, okay? And again, as an entrepreneur, all of the value is created in the evolution of that initial light bulb into something that fits the market, that you can sell, and a product, right? It's all in that evolution. So any opportunity for feedback that you're not taking is a wasted opportunity. Always be asking. All right, thanks everybody. You can learn more about the Founder Institute at fi.co. Take care.