2.7 – Deconstructing a Pitch
The Content
For educators, a brilliant feature of pitches, especially 8-12 minute Venture Pitches, is that they are perfect learning objects. They’re like condensed diamonds with all their critical facets on display. For EVAs this makes critical analysis easy: any facet that is missing or deeply flawed is immediately apparent. Venture Pitches should display all of the following facets, while Elevator Pitches will likely showcase the most strategic ones:
- Pain Point: the market gap or problem the venture is addressing;
- Solution: the new product or service that resolves the pain;
- Differentiation: the reason someone will buy or use this new product or service, versus the alternatives;
- Marketing: where and how buyers/users will be reached;
- Championship: the competency of the venture’s leaders and advisors;
- Competition: an overview of competitors and partners;
- The Ask: how much money, etc, is required to take the next step; and
- The Return: how much and how soon will an investor be recompensed.
The Message
Ultimately a great pitch is just a well-told story. The numbers and the facts have to be exactly right, but engagement happens through the passion, persuasiveness, personality and skills of the presenter. Trust piggybacks on psychology: pitches without a human face aren’t as engaging, and if you don’t “like” someone you won’t like their pitch either. An EVAs advantage goes beyond psychology: an objective critical analysis of how well the facts correlate with what they know about the world, and how well the personal characteristics of the presenter correlate with what they know about successful people. Its more about what they say rather than how they say it. Here are the primary things EVAs should look for:
- CEO Credibility: does this person exude capability and convey confidence that they will achieve success against all obstacles?;
- Management Team: have they assembled a stellar team along with the other human and material resources required for success?;
- Venture Concept: is it feasible? – have they done their homework? – are their arguments and information accurate and compelling?;
- Opportunity Space: what is a realistic market size, market share and revenue that these products or services can capture in a very competitive world?;
- Market Readiness: how long and difficult is the critical path to success?;
- Competitive Edge: do they have any innovative advantage, and can they keep it?;
- Exit Strategy: do they really know what success looks like – is their destination clear?; and
- Overall Investment Status: how risky is this proposition, and my potential investment in it?
Successful ventures adapt and refocus continuously, often in significant ways, even on the fly. A good entrepreneur, like a good teacher, should be acutely responsive to audiences and changes in environment. During live presentations, EVAs watch carefully about how entrepreneurs respond to tough questions. Headstrong entrepreneurs won’t try to mend holes, perhaps even refuse to acknowledge them. Less confident entrepreneurs will waver on every new suggestion. The critical point is that pitches should get better and stronger with time, so EVAs have no patience for incomplete, lame or evasive propositions. An entrepreneur’s best strategy is to be upfront about their weaknesses, presenting them as known problems needing resolution.
You might want to view the Perfecting Your Pitch video from a seminar series provided by New Ventures BC:
Further reading on pitching ideas can be found here: How to pitch a brilliant idea by lsbach, K.D.,Harvard Business Review, September 2003. (You will need to be logged in to UBC’s VPN server to access the full-text version of this article. For more information on how to establish a VPN connection with UBC, please refer to http://www.library.ubc.ca/home/proxyinfo/)
You might also enjoy the presentation by David Heinemeire Hansson (Ruby on Rails, 37Signals) at Startup School 2008 about the failed logic of most startup pitches.
The Pitch Pool
In ETEC522 we once maintained a “Pitch Pool” of local, real-world venture pitches to serve as an authentic learning resource. However, since the dawn of the YouTube age, the web is full of lots of examples of real people pitching real ideas. Television has also got into the act with “Dragon’s Den”.
Such video pitches reveal real people exposing the souls of their ventures (and themselves) for your edification and viewing pleasure. Following are a few focused on learning-related ventures (including one from a 522 student a couple of years ago, possibly to give you a sense of what you could create for A3!):
- eduFire.com elevator pitch (YouTube)
- Evernote elevator pitch (YouTube)
- WEBook elevator pitch (YouTube)
- ETEC522 Student Pitch for Royal Roads Univerity’s open courseware initiative (2009)
You might also want to check out silicon.com, which offers a small library of 60-second elevator pitches, including analyst Q&A.