The idea is to be able to quickly and succinctly tell the full story of the business without thinking about it too much.

You get 5 seconds per slide. Just finish the end of the sentence.

A message to our Sydney-based startup friends. Pollenizer is sponsoring Coming to America event, now on Thursday, October 15, 2009 from 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM.

Rich venture environments exist where there is a pool of successful entrepreneurs re-investing back into the kind of businesses that they understand. The guys at Mitchellake are a unique bridge between Australia and the US and they have pulled together a terrific panel of US-based Aussies who have ‘made it’ and now want to share the love back to the Australian community.

If you are ready, this is a great opportunity to pitch your business to a switched-on panel of investors and connectors and learn how to tune your story to the people that live and work on the other side of the ocean.

If you are a startup, ML are offering student pricing for you.

See you there!

I just wish they’d care a little bit more about the story. It would make the listening and getting pumped up about it even more enjoyable.

What’s the issue? Mainly that it’s a rolling essay more than an exciting tale of opportunity. It often starts in the middle, jumps back to the start, goes to the middle again in more detail. More detail. Another feature. And often forgets the ending all together.

I often joke that it takes 100 cups of coffee to get a new startup funded. Not because the investor is 1 out of 100 but because it takes a long time to get the story good.

My quick tips;

• Tell the story a few times to people who get you and see what parts excite them and what parts confuse them.
• Take that story and put it in a single page, like our executive summary. If you can’t tell it all in one page, then you haven’t thought it through enough.
• Start telling it again with a 5 minute limit. Ask people to repeat it back to you and tell you what they heard. If it’s not simple enough and clear enough then you’ll get Lithuanian (or Chinese) Whispers back to you.
• Go to networking events or trade shows. Not to find money, but because that’s where people ask you “So, what do you do?” You’ll fumble over it and they’ll ask lots of crazy questions, but you’ll hone your skills.
• Revisit your one pager.
• Make up a simple presentation following Guy Kawasaki’s rule of pitching. Don’t break any of the laws. None.
• Line up the coffee. Get a list of people you want to pitch to and start with those that you (a) don’t care about their response AND (b) have a good chance of good feedback. So don’t start with Sequoia, Ron Conway or Morten Lund.

It takes patience and it takes a very very very rare skill of being able to listen to people and ignore them at the same time. Why? Because their feedback is real, but people’s feedback can also disuade you from building something amazing just because they couldn’t see it OR it could distract you from what you can see by adding some stupid twist that is more about them than it is about you.

Tough. But welcome to the job.

Enjoy! And try not to have all 100 cups on the same day….

Photos:
Sarah McCans
Mike Schinkel
Spyndle

Whilst having a sushi/beer dinner with Atari Boy last night, we were talking about how sometimes you have an idea, flesh it out, then as you start telling people, it starts whittling down and dying on the vine.

Don’t get me (us) wrong, the feedback is great, but we realised that we wanted the feedback at different times.

There is lessons here for pitchers and pitchees.

For the pitcher

Try and pre-frame, which means establishing a boundary by which you want the pitchee to take your pitch. If you don’t pre-frame you’re probably going to get the devils advocate (or as Cris and I worked it out to be, the 1,000 demons that eat away enthusiasm and creativity).

You pre-frame by telling them what you want and what you don’t want.

For example;

“OK, so I’m going to tell you this idea that kept me up last night. There is 100 challenges and 1,000 questions, but for now, I really want to just explore how big it is and how great it could be. So try not to look for ways that it couldn’t work, let’s see if we can find out how it could work.”

Ask them to leave their demons at the door.

For the Pitchee, if you can, try not to start thinking about what is wrong. Stay on what is right first. Help them out. You know how hard it is on the otherside of the table. You know that it’s not easy coming up with something new that is solid.

Sentences to avoid as a pitchee;

“Hmmm, have you had a look at __________ ?” – unless there is an exact competitor, but even then, it would be better to say “______ is doing something similar – so there must be a market there!”

“Yeah, but don’t you think that ______________?” – try and build on it for now, not knock it down.

“That’s going to be hard.” – derrr! Of course it’s going to be hard. If it were soft it would be tofu. If it’s big, exciting and a worthy challenge then who cares how hard it is, you’ll get through it.

* Notice how I pre-framed this blog post. Did it work?