How to fail your pitch before you've even started

[Ewan McIntosh]

The VentureBeat blog gives superb advice for anyone pitching their idea, from Jason Cohen, a startup entrepreneur who's been there and done it three times already and now sits on the other side of the table as an Angel investor.

The four sins Jason picks out are the same four we see frequently at 4iP:
1. Folk are dismissive of the competition.
Nearly every time there is competition and they are generating x times more revenue than your idea does: show where the competition excels to highlight the gap you're filling.

2. People think we should believe their "conservative" five-year projections.
The fact is that without investment most ideas will head into a linear downward line before imploding. A projection of sales, ads, users... it's all guesswork and, unless you're really clever, it's hard to correlate what a specific investor brings to the added value you see on the balance sheet.

3. Companies gloss over their strategy for customer acquisition.
My personal pet hate, and one that colleagues in Education New Media also face: how are people going to find you, let alone stay with you? User acquisition needs to be baked into online and mobile products - it's not enough to rely on marketing. The best products could even go as far as saying they market themselves. I've written before on the notion of gaining attention and creating sites no-one needs to visit.

4. Pitchers write down what they think they “should” do instead of what feels right.
Don't shoehorn proposals to "fit" with the guidelines or steer of a particular investor, including 4iP. Write down what feels right for the idea and, to some degree, let us worry about whether it fits or not.

Read more over on Jason's guest post at the VentureBeat blog. You might also find some useful nuggets in this rapid-fire talk from David Rose on pitching dos and don'ts:


Thanks to Phil Adams at Blonde for the tip of the hat.

[Dan Moss]

Very insightful stuff. Thanks for the post Ewan.