You already know the elevator pitch is critical to your business, not just for pitching but to crystallize the goals of the company in your own mind.
You might also have developed a one-line positioning statement — a single sentence that defines the company in a simple, clear, sentence.
Big picture folks - we are in a bad, vicious, negative economic cycle with no end in sight. I hate to repeat bad news, but we
What if tomorrow I forced you to double your price?
If you sell software, your prices just doubled. If you’re an hourly consultant, your rate just doubled. If you’re a salaried employee, you’re now demanding double your salary.
Ignoring the (understandable) backlash from your existing customers/employer, what would you have to do to justify the new price tag?
Great results never come easy, right?
Tiny startups will always have shortcomings compared to the big boys.
Three people can’t run 24/7 tech support. A single consultant cannot always answer the phone. Software might have more bugs and fewer features than the competition.
Your customers know it, and you get to hear about it.
“I’m not comfortable buying from a small company; what if six months from now you go out of business?”
“What if I have a problem on Saturday?”
“I tried calling you but got an answering machine — on a Thursday!”
Do you try to hide these shortcomings, or do you turn it into an advantage?
In my experience you can’t hide. Oh you can try, and boy have I gone down that road, carefully selecting my words so that I’m not lying per se but still hiding the fact that I was a one-man software shop.
“We have hundreds of users.”
A business plan, an elevator pitch, a pitch deck — the number of different things you have to have to successfully pitch your company is amazing. Now add in the one pager. Whether you call it that or an executive summary or a company overview, it’s an essential part of the whole story. Like the one-page resume, you want a single, concise one-page document that you can hand to potential investors and business partners. There are lots of advantages to having it be a single page, but I’m only going to mention the most important one — investors expect it.
To create my one pager, I started with my five-page business plan. I went through and highlighted all the most important stuff, then consolidated that in a new document which ended up about two pages long. Then I started looking for things to trim. I was pretty close to finished when I decided that I should make sure what I was doing was consistent with what I needed to submit to another competition, the Willamette Angel Conference (although I’ll be at a disadvantage because Groupthink isn’t an Oregon company, I figure the extra connections will be worth it). It was at that point that I realized I’d made a mistake. The Willamette Angel Conference uses Angelsoft, and the whole way it works is different — your one pager gets created by filling in a form on the site. Here are the items you’re asked for:
Each of these items also has a longer explanation you see as you’re filling out the form. For example, the explanation for “Define customer problem” reads: Investors fund pain killers, not vitamin pills. What critical customer need does your company address? If you are a web company, you may need to make a hard decision here on whether to talk about your audience or the people who will ultimately pay you (like your advertisers). You only get 210 characters to answer that one. When you’re done, Angelsoft turns your information into a one page summary that looks like this sample:
At first, I was thrown for a loop, but then I realized that this was a much better way to do it. After all, investors looking at your one pager have a bunch of questions in their head that the’ll use to decide if they want to read anymore. If you don’t answer those questions, it’s over. So the number one task really should be to make sure you answer those questions!
In the process of answering the questions, I managed to get in every one of my key points and pretty much nothing extraneous, but the document wasn’t exactly what I wanted to best represent the company. For Angelsoft applications, I have to take what I get, but that’s not true for NWEN or other investors. So, after I finished up the Angelsoft process, I took all the information and created a new document that I could edit. Then I made a few changes:
In each of the cases, I made the change to improve readability or punch. But, overall, it’s a lot like the one pager from Angelsoft.
When I’m pitching my Web site, I’m often asked what my “cash-burn rate” is.
That’s startup speak for: “How long can you keep going until you run out of money?”
But cash burn isn’t my problem. My costs are low: You can run a Web site with laptop, an Internet connection and $6.95 web-hosting account.
The wall I’m facing is my COBRA.
COBRA, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986, is the law that lets you stay in your employer’s health-insurance plan for 18 months after you leave your job, provided you pay the premiums yourself.
It’s not cheap. But it does give you some breathing room between jobs.
But once my 18 months are up, the chances of me finding affordable health insurance for my family on my own are slim, and I may have to punt on my startup and go hunting for a job with benefits.
According to economists, up to 25 percent of workers would move on to other jobs, or strike out on their own, if they didn’t fear losing their health coverage.
Time and time again, we hear that innovation, led by entrepreneurs and small businesses, is going to recreate the U.S. economy so it can thrive in the 21st century. And as behemoths, like General Motors, Chrysler and Ford, totter toward possible extinction, our only hope is that someone is coming along with ideas for new businesses.
But many of those potential entrepreneurs are not going to be given a chance to experiment and innovate if they can’t strike out on their own. They are locked into their current job because of health insurance. Shackling workers to jobs they don’t want hobbles the U.S. economy at a time when it needs to be nimble and quick.
So why do we have our current system? It turns out, our employer-based system is really an accident of history. After World War II, the U.S. economy was overheating, and to keep inflation down, the government imposed wage controls. So to attract employees, businesses started offering health and other benefits. In time, employer-based insurance ended up providing most Americans with their coverage but leaving more than 47 million
Most ideas are great ideas until proven otherwise.
I’ve gotten a lot of advice on my slide deck for the NWEN First
Raising money for a new startup in these economic times can be at best difficult and often impossible. But there are silver linings that may make the current environment a godsend for the frugal entrepreneur.
If you have been able to put together enough cash from friends and family or angels to get started it could well be the perfect time to launch your new venture. Here