Pittsburgh Ventures

A couple of nights ago I was invited to CMU to judge some elevator pitches (along with Dave Mawhinney and Mel Pirchesky – Mel is considered by most to be the godfather of the elevator pitch, and you can read a guest post he made here at Pittsburgh Ventures about a year ago) from undergraduates and graduate students.  Most did a very good job; several made outstanding presentations that really got me excited about the direction of the Pittsburgh entrepreneurial ecosystem.

If you don’t know what an elevator pitch is, you can read alot about it online – just Google ”elevator pitch” and you will see plenty.

When you judge something like this, you have to be thoughtful about the feedback you provide – so I took a moment to reflect on what I find to be most important in an elevator pitch.  Different people like to hear different things in a pitch – so the basic rules of tuning your message to your audience apply, but I find these basic ideas helpful:

• You MUST HAVE a description of the problem  you are solving – even if it is just a simple, “Don’t  you hate it when…”
• You MUST HAVE a compelling description of your solution – something that tells us what product of service you are building, and in terms that we can grasp in just a few seconds.
• If you can give me a tag-line (“Photo tagging made simple”) or an analogy (“We are building the Facebook version of Blackboard”) you have likely made the description easier to grasp.

Since you don’t know how long your hypothetical elevator ride is, that may be all you can do.  You get extra points if you have a longer time and can give me some more details such as:

• Market Size – how big are we talking about?  Is it enough to get me excited?  And always remember – market size is most effectively expressed in $$$.
• Economics – how are you going to make money?
• Team – why are you the right people to build this company?  What are your unique credentials?
• Competition – who else is out there doing this, and why will you win?
• Ask/Next Steps – sometimes this is too blatantly commercial, but since you having the conversation, many people would like to know what it means for them… so let them know  if you are raising money, if you need connections that person may have, or if you are looking to hire and you think an introduction may be in order.

It is important to remember that you must get the first three bullet points in NO MATTER WHAT – none of the additional points (“extra credit”) count unless you have given your listener a good idea of what you are doing  and why.

Related articles

• Elevator Pitches are Hard (dorai.wordpress.com)
• “Rock” Your Elevator Pitch (carriewriterblog.com)
• The Elevator Pitch (likeswimming.wordpress.com)
• The 3 Version Elevator Pitch For Your Online Business (iblogzone.com)