Having a startup naturally lends you to situations where you're describing what product your company is building. Whether pitching to friends, relatives, other startups, or investors, it's a pitch to potential customers in one form or another, and they're all different! Some people are accustom to pitches and are able to switch into the mindset of understanding the concepts you're describing. For others it's easier to give them a use case that applied to yourself, or possibly to them if you know enough about them. And maybe you just have to feel them out and ask questions.
When people talk about pitching ideas, they start thinking of adjectives to describe how "amazing" or "simple" or "powerful" their product is. Then they talk about the concepts and parts of the product that are one of those things, peppering it with those adjectives. It's easy for someone to understand what your building, but it's unnatural for the average person to realize why it's so cool for them.
Face it, nobody cares about something unless it benefits them. At the end of the day, nobody is thinking about how cool a product is for a mass of people that's unrelated to them.
I've been experimenting with how to pitch FanPulse to people. In the end, they always get it, but how excited they are varies tremendously. Some people are excited because I've successfully persuaded them that they are the ideal user, and they can really see themselves using it. Getting to that point is hard, and you can't rely on the person to get there themselves. Just telling them about your product isn't going to give them enough to realize how they could use it. Some people have the ability to take ideas and products and somehow assimilate it into their daily lives, but that takes a lot of work on their part.
What if you asked a question to start a pitch? The question could be asking if they have a problem that your product can solve. Let's take a quick example for FanPulse: Have you ever wanted to keep up with sports that you and your friends love, but never have the time? This is a hit or miss for sure. Let's talk about the misses. The person has zero desire for sports, so the answer is absolutely no. The person is a huge hardcore sports fan who plays fantasy and has a set of box scoreboards they visit on an hourly basis. So no, they follow it fine.
The ideal answer is: "yeah I used to follow the Oakland Athletics, but just never had the time to keep up." Then it's easy to tell them that FanPulse is perfect because it spoon feeds them information about the games. It's also easy to tell them that they will also be able to talk to their friends (in real life) about sports in conversations that you're usually left out of. But what if they're not ideal? Well most of the time it's not going to be.
A good starting question could be super simple. "Like sports?" Probably, if not, you'll just have to impress by explaining the cool "Machine Learning Algorithms in the cloud" you built to impress people. Kidding! If the person really doesn't like sports, I'd probably defer to a use case for yourself. Then they might realize that, yeah, I could like sports too if it was this easy. Here's my favorite: A lot of my friends are Cal Berkeley Bears fans because they went to Cal. I didn't, so I don't really care about the teams, other than the fact that a lot of my friends talk about them. I wanted something to help me follow their teams without needing to commit the amount of time they did. (pause for a nod from investor) FanPulse tells me what games my friends are watching, and if it's interesting enough, I'll check-in to a game so I can get updates just for that game. Tomorrow I can talk to them about everything. FanPulse is my secret weapon.
I'm pretty sure people will understand my story, and see the possibilities of them being in similar situations, or at least give me the benefit of the doubt that this is totally happening to masses of people already. The use case is probably just the tip of the iceberg, so if they are still interested tell them what the product is. FanPulse gives you lists of games, showing which friends or general fans are following, and you can also follow by checking in. Check-ins then give you game updates, friend activity updates, and ultimately rewards you for your own activity with virtual goods and real life monetary goods like game tickets. So there, I just told you (and could have drawn on a napkin) the basic features we have, but you can now connect it with the problem we're solving.
So how do you pitch? Pitch with a Question, use case, or just a general description? How about all three? I'd love to hear what you guys think, and please don't take any of my pitching above as the real deal, they were just quick examples I pulled out of my pocket.
