Techcrunch/FOWA pitch: What I learned.

Thanks to Marc Berry for the awesome photo

On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA), I had the amazing opportunity to pitch the iPlatform on-stage to Ryan Carson, Mike Butcher, Jason Calacanis and Brent Hoberman. A huge thank you to Mike at Techcrunch UK and Ryan to organising the event, which included four other start-ups (chosen by Mike and Ryan from a host of start-ups who submitted video pitches to Techcrunch UK). 

We had 60 seconds (60!) to pitch, after which the judges had the opportunity to ask a question each, then they marked us out of 10. It was a pretty fast and furious format, so fitting in everything I wanted to say was difficult. 

So, how did it go? I'd say medium. It was my first public pitch (to a packed conference room), but I'd say my general level of calm and presentation was fine. However the feedback from the judges on the content of the pitch was mixed, and this is where I learnt the most important lessons. It's often said that you should talk about the benefits of the product and not the features. Before Thursday, I had assumed that this was more a matter of how you framed what you were saying; however I learnt that this is about the fundamental content of your pitch, not just how you get it across. In the sixty seconds I had, I talked about what the product was and how it did it, and our basic revenue model. This just didn't get the excitement or value of the product across.

Luckily I did get a chance to redeem myself (unintentionally) during the questions, when in response to a question from Brent I shared how I originally came up with the idea of the iPlatform. I'd been doing some research for Chelsea Football Club at the beginning of the year. Chelsea have their own community site ('the shed') which has around 10,000 users, actively engaged with each other discussing the club, creating a significant amount of email sign ups and traffic to their website. My research into fan activity within social networks found around 60,000 Chelsea fans actively engaged in unofficial groups within Facebook alone, similar numbers in MySpace, and around 80,000 in Bebo - almost twenty times the amount of users across the three social networks, compared to Chelsea's own site. This wasn't because the shed has a high barrier to entry; far from it (it's just email and password, no profile information is required). The only real reason was that the groups were on the social networks where the fans were already spending their time, and where they based their online social activity. It was this research which planted the seed of the idea for the iPlatform in my head, and it was this story which really showed the huge benefit of the iPlatform (to distribute a community site to all the major social networks), as well as clearly differentiating it from tools such as Facebook Connect, which allow you to take your social graph data to an external site. Next time, this story will be the core of any pitch I do. 

The second interesting lesson is that when you're talking about your revenue model, show how it's scalable. It was fine for us to say that we charge for our product, but the main question from the judges was how this was going to scale (which unfortunately I didn't have the time to answer), as opposed to having a long sales process for every implementation. There are some aspects to this which I can't talk about publicly, but I should have communicated that although we can work directly with the end-clients, our core market is interactive agencies who can use it as a tool for multiple clients, essentially outsourcing a large part of our sales process to our customers. 

So - well done to ERepublik, who got the highest marks from the judges, and a big thank you to everyone who came along and cheered for me (especially the wonderful Zuzanna from Huddle)!