How to Pitch an Idea at Techraising and Build your Startup Team

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We had a great turnout for our February TechRaising Meetup. Thanks to everyone who attended, and to productOps for hosting and providing pizza and beverages. About 20 passionate TechRaisers filled the room and shared ideas about how best to pitch your idea and build a startup team.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with TechRaising, at the beginning of the event on Friday night, each participant has 90 seconds to get up and pitch their idea to the crowd. After everyone pitches, there is the
chance to walk around and talk to each other about the ideas and to form teams that will work on the ideas over the course of the weekend. On Sunday afternoon the teams will demo what they built. The goal of the pitch is to get people interested in talking with you.

Here are some of the key takeaways (thanks to Bennett for taking such great notes):

Who do you need? What makes a team? Each team needs to fill these roles – a single person may fill more than one role and some people may work on multiple teams:

  • Entrepreneur with a vision
  • Developer(s) (at least 1, maybe 2 or more)
  • Designer
  • Marketing/Brand
  • Product/Project Person

What attracts developers?

  • Interesting idea.
  • Opportunity to play w/ new tech.
  • Open minded entrepreneur (will adapt idea to realities).
  • Clearly defined problem with light at the end of the tunnel.
  • Feasible/realistic to achieve Minimum Viable Demo by end of weekend
  • The idea is disruptive – in a good way.
  • Ability to be profitable, but this is often a secondary motivation.
  • Fun.
  • Serves a purpose.
  • Will help people in the end/has values.

General ideas on how to structure your pitch

  • Define the problem you are trying to solve.
  • Better to solve one problem than try to do to many things.
  • Maybe state why better than what currently exists.
  • Create vision of what solution looks like – use real examples.
  • Use visual words to put images of the final product in the listeners’ heads.
  • Presentation materials can be helpful.
  • Relate to what already exists – use examples like “It’s Groupon for charities” – easy to remember, good for PR.
  • State why it’s important and who cares about it.
  • Use language that will attract the members of your team that you need. Designers and Developers may not respond to the same language or motivations. If you are a developer and need a designer you may wish to adjust your pitch to highlight your opportunity to exercise creativity in the project. If you are a designer looking for a developer you might want to talk about how technically cool or disruptive the he idea is.
  • If you are looking for someone with specific skill you may wish to say so.

How to convey the importance of a pitch

  • Express your idea passionately – be animated
  • Allude to the impact that your idea will have

TechRaising Spring 2012 will be April 20th-22 6pm-6pm and held at Cruzio.

Developers should come with development environments set up and ready to work.

The next meetup is Thrusday March 15th and will be held at Cruzio. The topic: Attracting Early Adopters and Generating Buzz for your Idea.

Make sure to RSVP so we know how much Pizza to get.

Hope to see you there!