With the Angel Forum coming up next week and New Ventures BC well underway, we're starting to get contacted by a lot of bright-eyed bushy-tailed entrepreneurs looking to score some coverage. And that's fantastic. Kinda.
Here's the thing: it appears you guys can't pitch to save your lives, never mind your business.
So how do you get our attention? A few tips:
And if you really want us to hold your hand, then fine – here's a template you can use to address the first two points outlined above when describing your product:
<Product name> is a <type of product/product category> that delivers <statement of benefit> to <target customer>. Unlike <specific competitor/competitive category>, <product name> provides <statement of differentiation>.
Bottom line: we're here to help, but we're not really that enthusiastic about doing much work in the process. Best of luck next week!
Hear, hear! Great summary for folks pitching blogs and online mags.
Interesting post Brendon. I've seen many of these "how to pitch" posts, most recently on RWW. I have to admit, I am not fond of them.
Do something interesting, show some passion, use some common sense, and you'll get noticed. We don't need rules or guidelines for that.
I would also like to add: do not pitch blindly. You should really know who you are pitching and understand what space he/she covers. If you are a gaming company pitching a blogger, who covers clean tech your wasting their time and yours. Once you understand who it is that you are targeting, tailor your pitch so it is interesting, like Mack said and meaningful to each and every blogger/journalist you are talking to. Simply addressing the 5W's, in my opinion, is not enough to get the kind of coverage you want.
Remember, the best pitches get people fired up.. Don't just tell bloggers what IT is - sell the dream, your passion - the whole reason you quit your day job in the first place. Take all that passion, put it into a pitch, be concise and bring it.
Yeaaaah. I'm gonna have to go ahead and...disagree with you there Mack.
While I understand that the format outlined above might be boring, it's meant as a starting point. It's meant as a bare minimum. Sadly, there's a lot of people out there who just aren't as smart as you ;-)
As to your point that passion matters - I couldn't agree more, with some caveats. Sure, tell your story in your own words and do it with passion. But if I can't figure out what it is you do and why it matters, you're wasting your time and that of your audience.
Pitching with passion but without successfully communicating is like fighting a duel with vigor but failing to land a single blow.
I agree, you need to communicate your story well. I guess what I was trying to get at is that the person (or ppl) is usually more important than the idea itself - if they can't figure out on their own how to communicate what they're doing effectively, do you really want to look at the idea anyway?
I don't think your points are boring or too simplistic, but I do think they make it easy for the less-than-spectacular to squeeze through, simply because they followed instructions.
Said another way, we want to write about purple cows. Instructions for how to pitch make it too easy for brown cows, IMHO. :)
Ah, gotcha.
Well, from what I've seen, there's a lot of smart people with innovative technology that are passionate, but really don't know how to communicate that their idea is important. They're far too embedded in the technology. A little guidance will help turn a few of those frogs into princess and princesses. Or..uh...cows?
Yeah that's true. Fair enough!
For future readers of this thread who may be unfamiliar with the purple cow idea, it's from a book of the same name by Seth Godin. Check out this Wikipedia article:
http://tinyurl.com/6mo76f
A couple of additional thoughts from someone in the business of pitches:
1) Use technology to extend the life of your pitch to video. Whether via Youtube, www.vator.tv or now www.fundfindr.com, you can easily capture, share, embed your pitch and make it more interesting than text and last longer than your last conversation at the networking event.
2) Feedback, feedback, feedback. Pitch as much as you can and ask for direct feedback - good and bad. We see a lot of pitches and the bad outnumber the good. Talk market not product geekboy/girl, remember to reference your business model and close with your specific needs - what are you looking for?
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