Originally posted on the IBM Global Entrepreneur Blog on February 5, 2016.
Product. Team. Customers. Funding. The essential elements of a startup. But one more essential piece is missing: Pitch.
The Pitch is arguably the most important non-business piece of your startup. From your elevator pitch, to your public pitch, to your investor pitch, the more successful you are, the more integral these will become to your business and your life. Because of its importance, you should take absolutely every opportunity to pitch, especially in the early stages.
The first and biggest benefit from the always pitching mindset is practice. Don’t practice until you get it right, practice until you can’t get it wrong, is the modus operandi of true professionals in every walk of life. This needs to be your motto. Living room pitch practice only takes you so far; get out in front of the public and practice your pitch.
Now that you’re out in the public, you’ll benefit from the next most important thing: feedback. The Lean startup methodology is build, measure, learn. When you have built something, whether mockups, a fully functioning product, or anything in between, pitching becomes a part of the measure stage, and the feedback you receive is part of learning. This accelerates the Lean process for your startup, and gets you closer to product-market-fit, faster. Listen closely to the questions, and aggregate the feedback across many pitches to find the common threads. Use this to iterate for your next pitch and your next build.
Another benefit of always pitching is that you get to show lines not dots. The winner of IBM Smartcamp Boulder, Lawbooth, went on to win the regional and semi-final rounds of Smartcamp because they could show lines–progress and traction across a longer timeframe. The judges in Boulder had seen them pitch many times, and because of this, specifically commented on their growth over the past year. Being out in the community, pitching your startup over and over, while showing growth shows grit and dedication–two things investors love to see.
You can perfect your pitch through IBM SmartCamp and there are plenty of opportunities to pitch in your community too. You can look for some of the more common ones such as 1 Million Cups, events at startup weeks, or pitch competitions at local co-working spaces. Galvanize Pitches & Pitchers is one such example.
IBM’s Smartcamp is one part pitch competition, networking opportunity and a chance at competing for a spot in an incubator with investment in thirty cities globally. The top ten companies from this year’s competition got invited to LAUNCH Scale in October, and are soon to attend LAUNCH Festival in March. Along the way they got personal pitch coaching from one of the top angel investors in the world, Jason Calacanis, and had the opportunity to present in front of thousands of people at both LAUNCH Scale and soon, LAUNCH Festival.
If you’re interested in perfecting your pitch through IBM SmartCamp, you can click here to learn more about the program and enter your email address to receive details about the 2016 IBM SmartCamp.