I recently attended the Launch Festival (www.launchfestival.com) in San Francisco. It is labeled as the world’s largest startup event, a place where startup companies show their products and meet investors. I saw a lot of great companies and watched them as they pitched investors for startup or growth capital. Some of the lessons I learned:
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Articulate - You must be able to articulate your company’s products or services in terms that someone from outside the industry can understand. Quite often, the easiest way is to tell a story about your end user. “Joe owns a company that just had his internal server crash and they don’t have a backup…”. Also know your elevator pitch, a 30 second speech that you can give to a stranger in an elevator.
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Market – Know your market. Who are you targeting for your products or services? How large is the market, and what is your revenue potential? Showing these numbers with precision increases investors’ confidence in your ability to perform.
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Competition- Know your competition. Yes, everybody has competition. Be prepared to separate yourself from the other contenders. Perform a SWOT analysis; Strengths, Weakness, Opportunism and Threats. This will help you to solidify and articulate your position in the market.
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Marketing- How are you getting your brand out. Social media is king. Become a master of Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. Learn gorilla marketing techniques, crazy marketing that can cost almost nothing.
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Revenue – Gone are the days of great startups that are losing money to gain market share. Be prepared to state how you will monetize your product or service. Know when and how much profit you will be making.
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Subscriptions- Gone are the days of selling a product one time and hoping to sell future upgrades. Services and Products are being packaged as subscriptions. This makes it more affordable for end users at the start, but more importantly, you can generate a predicable revenue stream. Almost anything can be packaged as a subscription. Robotic coffee brewers, diabetes testing and prescription management.
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