Berlin is an amazing city to live in but also to stumble upon a flourishing number of startups & founders. Over the course of my journey here, I’ve had the occasion to participate in events all more compelling from one to another.
This written piece will be the occasion to tell about the “APX Pitch Tuesdays” at the APX Axel Springer Porsche GmbH & Co headquarters – APX is a venture company. This weekly event is the occasion for the startups part of the incubator to pitch their project to a whole audience of neutral participants in order to get some feedback.
Pitching a new venture to investors is an exciting but daring endeavor. It requires decisiveness, focus, liveliness… among other characteristics, but – most of all – PREPARATION.
In this article, I’m going to discuss a type of pitch based on the various presentations I’ve had the occasion to see at the APX Pitch Tuesdays.
Remember that when pitching your project, you’ll have about 5 minutes so you’ll need to think about 3 essential key points:
– The storyline (the pitch should feel logical)
– The delivery (careful about your environment but also yourself: SMILE)
– The design of the presentation (let’s not make it charmless)
Furthermore, you’ll need to have in mind that investors have a set of criteria they are going to evaluate before attributing any funds. Some of these are:
– A functional prototype
– Your users’ growth & engagement
– The financial model
– Your product plan & roadmap
– Your sales & marketing endeavors
– The members of your team
APX Pitch Tuesdays – “Readiness” dimensions investors look at.
This kind of pitch will try to make the audience empathize with a problem that a hypothetical user encounters.
Here, the character (our user) is encountering a problem but will be helped by a guide (your company) which gives them a plan (your solution) that will help them achieve success and alleviate failure.
1) A fact, a humorous quote, or a number which should grab the attention of the audience.
2) Followed by the presentation of the character, the user.
3) The character is encountering a problem based on a real-life situation.
(User doesn’t know any friends to play online games. / There are X billion of lost sales in the textile industry due to unsold clothing.)
4) Furthered by an introduction to the “real” problem.
(User needs a platform to connect with other users / Individual retailers do not have an overview of the whole market, thus leading to overproduction.)
5) This leading us to the introduction of your product’s characteristics alleviating this problem and furthering value creation.
– Market analysis & competitors
– Statistics about users
– Minimum Viable Product – how it works + benefits
– Business Model
– Pricing/Monetization
6) Current investors & support.
7) The team.
8) Vision for the future & mission statement.
Don’t forget to leave some room for questions, not going into details during your pitch isn’t substandard. On the contrary, it will awake your audience’s curiosity.
Hopefully, this small article may help some of the business founders out there. Don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you’d like to discuss the topic in detail.
We’re a creative studio based in Berlin and our clients span from industry leaders to promising startups. Engaging in a new venture implies thinking globally from the get-go but also requires channeling. From experience, we observed that clients abound with creative energy about their ventures but often lack the appropriate guidance to carry them over. Learning how to develop this kind of critical thinking is a continuous and essential process.
Receive handpicked content on design, UX, Innovation and sustainability every week
BACK TO BLOG
