Pitch-In is an event designed to help founders of early stage companies. Early Stage Founders present their business idea and receive kind-but-critical feedback.
What’s the Format of a Pitch Event?
The format is fast-moving and straight forward:
- The host introduces the companies. They also set the expectation that audience members provide kind-but-critical feedback.
- Three companies run the gauntlet
- The Founder pitches for 5 minutes
- The Host moderates 5 minutes of Question & Answer
- The Audience fills out a feedback form
- Host thanks the attendees and Founders for participating
- Host provides aggregated feedback to Founders
Benefits of Seed Stage Pitch Events
The event lasts an hour and provides a tremendous amount of value to the community.
- Pitching creates initial momentum. Folks with ideas become publicly accountable as the Founder of a startup.
- The community begin’s to understand what good startups look like. Community pattern recognition improves through exposure to more startup ideas and more founders.
- Community-wide analytical skills develop as group members ask questions based on their specialized knowledge.
- The event reinforces the “Give First” and “Everyone is Welcome” social mores.
- By audience members sharing their wisdom and network with the founders, the community gains a sense of pride and ownership.
Need to see an example of a Pitch-In?
Want to see what an event feels like? Check out this edited video of our May 22nd Event featuring 3 great startups.
How should presenter’s prepare for their first pitch?
I’ve previously written about pitching your company as a first step in founding your startup. Here’s the cliff-notes to help your presenters.
- Recommend that they build a Lean Canvas (?) for each one of their business ideas or customer segments. This will help them to build a more insightful deck and prepare for most questions they’ll receive during the Q&A portion.
- Build a deck based on Guy Kawasaki’s pitch deck template. If they’ve never built a venture deck before, this will provide 80% of what they need to be successful.
- What about the other 20%? Practice, Practice, Practice– Schedule zoom meetings with friends in advance to knock out any technical glitches, they should run through the deck until they know it inside and out.
Where’s the feedback form for event?
A template version of the feedback form is available here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeBUklEbZJW0DdXb68arJNkvGxu-eGF1aREde630aotsOdHjg/viewform
Please feel free to copy it or share your feedback on the questions we ask in the comments of this post.