Introduction to pitching your project

cool welcome everyone and I'm Yossi hacen I'm here to talk to you about how to pitch your project thank you for coming through and entrepreneurs and founders fundamentally don't really know how to pitch their projects they basically suck at pitching I know this because I've seen hundreds of pictures throughout my years and I can count the ones that are memorable on on one hand I'm OCS and I'm the managing director of the alchemist blockchain textiles accelerator it's textiles first dedicated blockchain accelerator program and I'm here to help you hopefully not suck at pitching your projects so before we go into the pitch itself what do you think the number one rule to think about is before you go and pitch what what would you say is the number one rule you can give me your name anyone less than one minutes okay I think that that could be the number one rule depending on the format what else okay concise and simplified yeah anyone else got an idea of what's the number one rule of pitching see what the problem in the solution all right almost there number one rule of pitching knowing your audience who are you pitching to who's in the room you're gonna be pitching a project and who are you pitching that project to who are you pitching the startup to so you guys might be pitching how's it going you guys might be pitching tomorrow who's the audience a bunch of developers who else some investors do you know who's potentially judging tomorrow you have vitalik it's pretty technical you have lousy Classen from 1kx is an investor and you have choice from global coin Research who is very much plugged in to the west and the west and east ecosystem and then you have everyone else here who's a teeth New York so what you want to think about is when you're pitching depending on who the audience how do you tweak your pitch to the individuals that you're going to be pitching to if it's just a panel of judges it might be different to a very technical audience and if it's a startup pitch competition that might be slightly different in how technical you go into what you're talking about so you've got to think about number one who's the audience that you're pitching to number two what's the goal of the pitch what are you trying to do any ideas when the hackathon there's definitely the end goal win the prize yeah and and how do you think you're gonna do that get people passionate and what's what do you how do you think and get someone passionate about what you got solve the problem for them yeah it's all the real use case that everyone's suffering great it's a soap that great UI so what makes the pitch so this is all the stuff that you're going to be talking about what makes the pitch the one that people remember you've got 20 people pitching how do you stand out in that pitch what are you competing with do you think in the audience you're competing with attention I am competing right now with you and then you're gonna be competing with everyone else against this device in someone's pocket it's gonna be buzzing it's gonna have Twitter so we have a whole world of excitement going on over here and you are between me and that excitement and you've got to be able to engage me and the way you can engage me is by entertaining me and impressing me that's really the way that what you're trying to convey in your pitch you may be trying to profit solve a big problem and maybe a big need it may have a solution that affects everyone but the only way you're gonna be able to articulate that is if you entertain me and impress me most pictures unlike tomorrow but most pictures you aren't there to actually get a check or get a customer or nail the deal in the room in that pitch you're trying to do it to most probably get another meeting you wanna entertain and impress the person enough that they want to come up to you and say I'd like to chat for tomorrow you got a right you also want to win the hackathon and win the prize so that's what you're trying to do so there's four sections to a pitch this isn't rocket science but this is what we recommend the general structure to be you've got the intro you've got the demo you have the business stuff and we'll talk through what that is and then you have the landing and the size of the blocks there is a rough indication of how much time you should be spending on each pending on how much time has been allocated to you this is how you should carve out the various components of your pitch so in a 5-minute pitch you'd be spending 30 to 60 seconds on the intro about 2 to 3 minutes on the demo a minute on the business staff to a minute and a half and 30 seconds on the landing that's how you would structure the overall arch of your story and parts that you go into the pitch let's talk about them the intro explaining what you do and why I should care that's what I call this is reason to care a lot of people start with the solutions thought about what you're doing but really what it is that you're doing and I should care I started this conversation here and this pitch here with that developers and entrepreneurs suck at pitching why would I start with that let's just to get your attention up it's maybe a bit dramatic but saying you suck at pitching maybe you're gonna listen to me on top of that I've spoken about your fighting for attention on top of that you want to in the introduction build your credibility for the problem and pain that you're trying to solve so what else did I say when I opened in the room I said entrepreneurs suck at pitching and I know that because I've seen hundreds of pitchers over the years and I can only remember a few on my hand and I'm you'll see from TechStars tech stars blockchain accelerator building in my credibility that I know this pain and the solution and this pain in this problem and I introduced myself and my brand and you can do all of that in 30 seconds 60 seconds if you need it but 30 seconds if you really are able to land it and then what you want to do in the intro on top of that is illuminate what we call in luminate the problem and I'm going to show you some techniques on how you can eliminate that problem how you can dig in deeper why this problem is a real pain that needs to be solved and that you should be focusing on and should be awarded the hackathon prize tomorrow and lastly or second lastly within the intersection you want to establish some baseline credibility why are you the person that I should be listening to what's the reason for me to believe that you have an understanding of this problem and be able to talk about it and that was all if you think about my opening contained in those the first 30 to 60 seconds and lastly what you want to be in the intersection is [ __ ] interesting going back to either impressing or entertaining me you want to be able to be the person who is interesting in the audience and be able to connect with the audience so some of the ways or some ideas on how to be interesting we are you can start off with a startling fact something that would be completely left field to what you're actually talking about an interesting personal story on how you got to standing in front of the audience you contradict conventional wisdom could make the audience laugh play to an own fear be appropriately different and make me go hmm that's very interesting so those are the kind of things that you want to do in this intro section I'm going to show you an example of one of those on how a great example of a company called Keene da-da-da-da-da Oh told their story in their pitch at one of the textiles demo days all right I want you to play attention to the opening story they help me explain how I'm gonna tell you a little story this is rocky a 16th century astronomer who's famous for playing an astounding amount of astronomical data every night right down to the position and the brightness of every star in every plan the sky and after 30 years of doing this he died luckily he had assistant named Johannes Kepler Kepler took Rocky's data applying his own genius and single-handedly came up with the laws of planetary motion can we still use to this day he comes brought he dedicated his entire life to gather all that data Johannes Kepler is now submitted in history as a genius and that's exactly what we do every mobile application is his own universe full of data being generated by millions of users and we can record that data in meticulous detail just like rocky when instead of stars and planets and their positions our technology records every touch every swipe every purchase and every share we've recorded every interaction within an application and store it in our data warehouse in the cloud and our customers use this data to discover to new patterns of how their users are application our technology unleashes their genius we turn our customers in detail - counselors Oh what do we think of that as an opening what's good thought it was good anyone thought yeah average don't to take my word for it happy happy for people who disagree what was anything bad about it how long was that how long do you think it was two three minutes one and a half minutes what's about two minutes if I was to criticize it it's a little bit long you could probably do that story in about a minute people start losing a little bit of attention but you get the idea of coming in with something that's interesting that didn't open up and say we're a mobile analytics company that tracks every movement that a person makes on their phone they took your imagination somewhere and then brought you brought you into it another technique that you could use is what we call twisting the knife when you're talking about the problem and I'm going to transforms the iPad and iPhone into a digital prescription pack enabling doctors to write prescriptions faster and safer that their current paper process I do this because this stuff kills people this is an example of completely illegible paper prescription the pharmacist in this case dispensed the wrong heart medication because he couldn't read the doctor's handwriting it mistook icer dil for Plan B and instead of controlling the patient's condition the medication caused a massive and fatal heart attack and this happens again and again and again in fact at one point seven billion handwritten prescriptions scrawled out each year on those familiar paper script paths up to 40% contains some form of error whether it's miss drug interactions improper dosing or just plain unreadable handwriting each year 7,000 people died and another million and a half are injured as a result of these errors causing billions in avoidable hospitalization let's be honest what she's gonna ask is who never wants to so you get the idea of what does it mean to twist the knife on a pain I'm spending quite a lot of time on the intro because that's really the hook of your entire pitch if you don't nail the first 30 to 60 seconds of your pitch the rest of the pitch is almost irrelevant you've lost the audience we've lost the attention of the people you're competing with their phone and they may hear what you're trying to say and if you're only going to bring in this information later it may not land so it's extremely important so when you're thinking about your pitches tomorrow what you should be it's almost allocating even though it's the first 30 to 60 seconds is 70% of your time on trying to get that intro in that hook and nailing that any questions so far cool a second time the second section what we call the demo section and this is probably the second most important part is where we talk about showing and don't showing instead of telling show me don't tell me you're all spending the next 48 hours hacking something together this is the time to actually show me what you've done and while you're showing me what you're done instead of just showing the technology also explain all the unique things that this now either enables or will enable once it's completed beyond what you've been able to achieve in the hackathon so an example of that a company called do CLE we make an app that lets friends discover and attend live music shows they're not the first ever to do something like that but the way that they demonstrated their demo showed an extremely rich application that did it was a UI and a UX and that was world-renowned I don't never have enough time what time does the session in roughly it's half an hour okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so what are you trying to do in the demo is not narrate what the person is seeing on the screen you're not talking through here I'm logging in here I'm connecting into this you may do that tomorrow because it's a technical audience and maybe that's the thing that's interesting what you really want to show them is all the the functionality that you're unlocking and the experience of the person is able to go through and all the unique differentiation that's able to happen because of the way you've built it what you can tell from this team over here just by watching their demo is that they're extremely good at UI and UX that the interface they've thought through the entire experience for an individual that they get how to make it as simple as possible to create that experience and their person didn't say we're experts in UI and UX and we've made the best a simple experience in application showed me how you were able to do that so tomorrow if you could able think about how you can show the thing that you've built you want to spend two minutes on that within within your pitch so show don't tell the next section the business section typically it's about money how will you make money how much how was your business model tomorrow may be different because you might be talking about an open-source project and a contribution and you are looking for some grant funding and it's not necessarily about a business model or it could be about a token structure or something along those lines but traditionally you'd be talking about the elements that make your organization you'll start up all this project interesting beyond just the technology and so you could be talking about a business model that revolves some kind of token economics this is live peer as an example it could be something more traditional where you have free versions pro versions and enterprise versions you're going to be talking about the market why this market and the size of the potential market and why this is something that needs to be solved and solves a big pain and you'll be speaking about how you go about differentiating yourselves from your competitors and the way you do that isn't by talking about what your competitors don't do you know necessarily say well there's these three other companies and this one doesn't do that and this one doesn't do that you talk about the things that make you unique so you rather just focus on the attributes that make your solution unique as opposed what makes the competitor inferior does that make sense right you speak about the team and put up a slide on who the people involved where and normally one or two unique things about the individuals not their entire CV someone you know contributed to Python just mention that as opposed to the 15-years developer or anything along those lines so you go into the team and people behind it I don't expect you to have much traction by tomorrow but maybe you've already been these are projects that you've been working on for some time what's the traction you've been able to achieve have you got this live running anywhere have you integrated with any other projects have you got people using it are there code commits whatever the things that could be that would show that this is someone this is a team that is able to not only execute but there is a response from the market that what you're doing is getting a positive response so that's the business stuff you spend 30 SEC sorry a minute to a minute and a half on that and covering all of those elements and then from there you're gonna go into the landing section you leave a lasting impression and you end leaving the audience wanting to come and meet with you and how do you do that a couple of things one you bring it back to what you spoke about in the beginning so you close from the intro we started about how entrepreneurs and founders suck at pitching so hopefully by the end of this you won't suck at pitching and you beat people over their head with your key points you reiterate the points that should but the key points that you wanted to make sure that they understand within the pitch and you stick the landing and the landing is that final line that you let you end with so hopefully within the next minute or so when you go and pitch tomorrow you won't suck at your at pitching because you'll know how to structure your intro how to do the demo showing me and not telling me all the business stuff that's involved and you'll be able to end the landing with grace and if you want to come and talk to me more about how to do that come and talk to me afterwards that's an example of how you would end pitch what most people do they don't like speaking in front of other people they're a little bit anxious as they go through all their content they're like oh my god - thank God and they leave the stage you don't want to be doing that when you're ending you want to stand there in your presence and thank the audience in that way and then some very quickly I've got 50 seconds some final thoughts while you're doing this pitch delivery is everything when you come on if you are a little bit stage fright and scared or anxious about it that can be felt and if you're gonna be you know if I came on and said I'm gonna talk to you today about and everything that goes into it you would feel that so delivery and how you come about the enthusiasm you bring into the audience counts and bringing your personality to the pitch Phuc bullet points no one people can't listen or and read at the same time no one can do both right now you're not listening to me you're reading what's on the screen so lots of text with verbage doesn't work skip it [ __ ] complex charts people don't have enough time and can't understand it so something like this sucks even if it makes complete sense to you but that can only work in a one-on-one environment where you can talk it through whereas something like that rocks it's very simple to understand and what you'll be able to do repeating it again people will listen or read they'll not do both and lastly generic language is deadly especially within the blockchain crypto world the amount of generic language and blockchain bingo that we use is deadly so avoided at all counts and then the last thing to remember is practice your answers to the questions that will follow up what are the top five questions that you think someone like metallic lousy or joist will bring at the end of your pitch practice answers to those so you can nail that as well and if you're able to do all of that you won't suck at pitching anymore thank you [Applause] any questions yeah yeah so what I would do in or I would take the same arc structure so understanding the problem and being able to introduce yourself and why people should care and the credibility of you as a person who can propose a solution then show me what the solution is then go through the business stuff how does it work what's the pricing how does it cost all of the types of things like that talk about the team and end with let's do business whatever the pricing and the proposal is to sign up make sense keep the same structure yeah yep I can share them I'll figure out how to how to make it available generic language is we've bought the next-generation ticketing system that leverages blockchain for immutable transactions for festival fans that's like its buzzwords it doesn't really tell me anything about what it is that you're trying to do next generation blockchain ticketing solution no that's cool I think that's all the time we have thank you very much thank you for coming through and I think we're having a workshop at five o'clock myself and Jake Brockman from coin fund I think we're spending two hours to help anyone crop their pitches so if you are working on a project and you want to come and actually workshop it we'll see you later