Thoughts on Pitching Your Idea
In our daily routine, we hear from numerous companies looking for ways to improve their pitch and overall web strategy.
I found this comment on the NextNY discussion group, and felt that it was insightful advice. In an interview Guy Kawasaki; the founder of Garage Ventures, was asked:
Q: So with all the advice you’ve given on pitching VCs, have you seen an improvement in the quality of pitches to Garage Technology Ventures?
A: Honestly, they’re not that much better. They are still too long, still using meaningless buzz words like “revolutionary,” and still don’t have credible business models. If only they would adhere to the
10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint: Ten slides, twenty minutes, 30 point font.
So the moral of the story is
Keep your powerpoint presentation simple.
- Make it readable form 20 ft away, or better yet don’t include much text at all.
- Remove the words “revolutionary,” “World Changing” and “This is going to be huge” from your vocabulary FOREVER!
- Stop mentioning that if you can achieve just 1% market share of an industry, you will be able to create a 100 million dollar company.
- Be different / Be interesting / Provide Value
If you want to learn more about effective pitching please see Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on the 10/20/30 rule
Just before we go, we leave you with a short piece on how to turn a compelling speech into utter PowerPoint boringness:
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