Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (10 page)

So it's best to make those 60 seconds count. Here is the advice we give to participants in what we like to call “Friday Pitchfire” about the questions to answer in order to use their time wisely:

 


• 5 to 10 seconds: Who are you?
  

 


 


• 10 to 20 seconds: What's the problem your product/service solves?
  

 


 


• 10 to 20 seconds: What's your solution?
  

 


 


• 5 to 10 seconds: Who do you need on your team?
  

 

It's been our experience that participants tend to focus too much on the first one: Who are you? When you're pitching an idea for a startup company, the audience
does
want to know something about you—if you have had experience in the field. For example, a guy who wanted to launch a company that would send kids a surprise toy in the mail each month said that he had worked in the toy industry, which of course gave him some credibility. But people at our events don't much care where you went to school, let alone if you finished. You can let the other attendees know where you're from or other personal details—but only if they're relevant, or if you think they'll somehow warm up the audience.

You want to get to your main point as quickly as possible. The most important part of the pitch is explaining the problem and making people understand the
pain-point
. We recall one guy who got up and explained that he recently bought a present for his girlfriend's birthday. It cost a lot of money and when he presented it to her, he said, “She looked at me like I had kicked a puppy.” Suffice it to say, she wasn't thrilled with the item he had chosen. His idea was to create a website that would help men buy gifts for the women in their life, and it was an easy sell after the audience heard that story. Which man in the room
didn't
have that experience? They would all want to check out “Manshopper.”

Another entrepreneur wondered aloud about the annoyance of conference calls: Who hasn't had the experience of either forgetting about a conference call or waiting endlessly on one for the other people to join? Whether you're the responsible party or the irresponsible one, the process is irritating. The person presenting a solution for this problem imitated the automated monotone voice that repeatedly requests the six-number code and announces the number of people on the conference call. When he went on to suggest that he could offer a way for your phone to ring when it was time for the call to begin, he had everyone in the room hooked.

When you think about explaining the problem, whether it's to an audience or an investor or your spouse, you should be thinking in terms of problems. Something out there is lacking. People who want to be connected are not being connected. People are unhappy with a service that is already being provided to them, or they can't figure out how to find something better.

It can be something serious, like noting that many individuals are willing to provide shelter to disaster victims while the victims and the larger shelter providers can't find one another. That's what the founder of Sparkrelief explained when he came to Startup Weekend in Denver, Colorado, in October 2010. He had been displaced by wildfires in California and was hoping to help others who had been put in the same position. Today, Sparkrelief “empowers communities and organizations to quickly share accurate information and provide relief during a disaster.” The group has been written up in
Time
magazine, received contributions from around the globe, and helped victims of the 2011 earthquakes and tsunami in Japan.

Don't worry, though. You can also pitch a problem that's a little more trivial. Like this one: Don't you love watching TV with your friends? How can you do it when they're not in your living room with you? With an Internet-TV application that offers video chat while you're watching, of course.

Deliver a Solution with One Sentence

So what about the solution? You should be able to summarize it in one sentence. Ignore, for a minute, all of the cool features you'd like to add and focus instead on the core product. How does it solve the problem you've presented? If you've done a good job of explaining the problem, the explanation of the solution should flow naturally.

Now is the time in your pitch to brand your product. Make up a name for your company. Even if it's not the one you will stick with in the end, it's important to leave people with a name to remember. When participants finish their 60 seconds without mentioning a name, we'll usually ask them to come up with one on the spot as they are walking away. Since the audience will be listening to pitch after pitch after pitch, you need to give them something to hang on to and set you apart from the crowd.

Angel investors and venture capitalists may not have 50 or 75 people pitching ideas to them in single a day, but they certainly have a lot over the course of a week—particularly when you count all of the people who find out what they do and want to chew off their ears over drinks or at a birthday party. But your audience, at both Startup Weekend and elsewhere, is not comprised of just investors. It's made of customers as well! Think about how many products and services bombard us with their advertising every day, every hour, and every minute via e-mail, texts, tweets, phone calls, television ads, billboards, and even signs on the sides of buses. You need a name to distinguish your product from the rest.

All of this advice about the substance of your pitch is good to understand. It is necessary, as they say, but not sufficient—because you need enthusiasm, too. Even if you are the last person in line to describe your product—and sometimes, you will be—you have to convey as much passion and energy as though it were the beginning of the day. By attending Startup Weekend, you are trying to get people to give up the next two days of their lives to work with you. You are asking for even more commitment in the real world. For this reason, you have to be committed to the idea yourself, as well as inspire the commitment of others.

Many Startup Weekend participants tell us that it takes them a few tries to
get the hang of it
; that is, they have to come to a few events before they really master the pitch. But even if you're really not that enthusiastic about your idea, there's no harm in trying it out. Some people we talk to have a list of ideas for startup ventures a mile long and just pick one at random when they arrive on Friday night. But when you're done with your own pitch, you want to watch for other people who have real passion. Those people have that vital first ingredient—
energy
—required to make a successful startup team. While you shouldn't be afraid to get up and offer your idea, you don't want to be too proud to put it on the back burner if you hear something that sounds more promising.

Build a Team

With a firm understanding of action-based networking and the art of the pitch, you can move on to the next phase of starting up a business: building a team. We ask everyone to make sure they tell us exactly whom they need in order to build their product at the end of their pitch. In part, that means assessing your own skills and figuring out what you are lacking. Are you a developer who really needs some design expertise, or a designer lacking any sense of business development? Now is the time to acknowledge where your idea needs some help and expertise.

But maybe you also want to see what other domains are like—in other words, try on another hat. Maybe you're very good at coding but you'd really like to see if you're ready to work on the business end. You'd want to get other developers to join your team so you're not the only one doing that specific task; this will free you up to work on other aspects of the project. It's a good way of building new skills that you might not be able to hone during your day job because the risks are too high. You might find out that you are good at something else; or you might realize you're terrible at it. The crucial thing to keep in mind is that you have nothing to lose. In much the same way that we put our products through multiple iterations, it's important to put ourselves through them. That's what entrepreneurs do.

Sean Kean, a former flight attendant who has been doing computer coding for 20 years, came to his first Startup Weekend looking to expand his horizons a bit. He has now tried the business end of things, and says that Startup Weekend allowed him to figure out the answer to the questions: “Where am I most valuable? Where can I be most effective?” Lately, he spends most of his time talking to investors and customers, and very little time coding. He says his partners are relieved because they prefer to be working on the back end of the project.

Keep in mind that you may not get everyone you want on your team. We try to bring together relatively equal numbers of designers, coders, and businesspeople, but we don't force people to join specific teams. Therefore, some teams have more than their share of one type of worker, and not enough of another. But that's just another challenge to overcome.

What You Need—Talent and Energy

Startup Weekend will help you learn the difference between what you want for your startup and what you need. You may want thousands of dollars, a legal adviser, a research team, and some gourmet food; however, you won't find any of those at Startup Weekend. But you will find what you
need
—talented, energetic people who are willing to adapt themselves to a project (and plenty of energy drinks).

When it comes to finding the right people for your team, the Startup Weekend crowd can be difficult. It is loud and people haven't organized themselves alphabetically or categorically. But in many ways, the chaos that follows the pitches at Startup Weekend mimics the real world. How can you get yourself heard over the din? How can you convince the right people to join your team, even
before
you have funding or customers? You have to worry about winning them over—and not just as part of a big audience listening to your 60-second presentation. You also have to make the case to them one-on-one. It's the difference between auctioning off a date with yourself to any takers in the crowd and finding the person you'd really like to take to dinner and convincing him or her to come along. How do you get to “Great, pick me up at 8”? or, as you hear it at Startup Weekends, “Meet me at the whiteboard with your dry-erase marker and laptop in 20 minutes”?