How To Demo Your Startup | Hacker News Reader

How To Demo Your Startup

techcrunch.com

42 pointsjmorin00710 comments

"There is only one Steve Jobs and there is only one Apple. You’re never going to build something as cool as Steve, and as such there is no need for you to talk about your product for five or ten minutes."

What a ridiculous statement. I don't want to get into the "power of positive thought" or something but seriously does anyone actually limit themselves like that? "I'll just plug away and hope to develop something mediocre that takes off.."??? If you aren't shooting to make THE coolest thing you can imagine why bother? And if you are why limit your imagination to be up to but not greater than some other persons imagination? Other than paying the bills etc. etc. but you get my point (but at that stage get a corporate job or make porn sites, seriously).

Also I disagree with the point that demoing google would have been as simple as "enter text press enter - wow results." Surely they would have had to demo WHY their results were more correct/ranked etc. to differentiate themselves from yahoo, lycos and who ever else was floating around in the search engine wars.

Also I disagree with the point that demoing google would have been as simple as "enter text press enter - wow results."

Exactly. Everyone's a retroactive genius on this one. But what would a cynical elevator pitch look like for Google in 1998? How about "We've built yet another search engine, in a market that has never shown even the potential for profit. Now give us some money."

Peter Cohan also offers a good overview in this webinar http://www.glance.net/custom/Webinars/PeterCohan_20080711/We... that's appropriate for enterprise / office 2.0 applications. He has a number of good articles on preparing for and managing the demo/sales process on his website at http://www.secondderivative.com/

Anyone else here apply for TC50? We did, although our 10 minutes was with Heather Harde, not Jason.

I have a feeling a lot of people around here did.

We demo'd one of our upcoming products to Jason.

I did, and got rejected as usual... automated rejection emails ftw

We did. Made it through round 1 and are still waiting to hear if we made it to round 2.

Yeah, we demo'd to Jason. Haven't heard yet about round 2, though I suspect the long silence means bad news. Based on his article, at least we got most of the basics right, though I think we failed on the crucial one, of getting across why our product is really interesting.

We did; got dinged for having already launched. :)

I'm scoring this at about 55% good material, which gets an upvote.

The problem, in my opinion, is that some of this advice is simply broiler plate, motherhood, and apple pie goodness.

Yes. Google can demo their product with one screen and a text box. Got the next Google? Then don't worry so much about your demo. Writing the next Space Shuttle flight system? I'd like to see more than a screen with flight numbers on it. (Probably take a lot longer than 5 minutes too). Sure -- write succinctly. Have a great opening screen from your software that draws the viewer in.

Don't show trivial bits? Hey, that's great advice. Care to tell me what's a trivial bit? I've been pouring blood, sweat, and tears into this puppy: everything is important. Once again, the general point of reduce your depth of presentation to important points for the listener is all goodness. But you'd better know the 2 or 3 little things that's going to put a twinkle in the eye of your viewer. Guess what? It's different every time.

I liked the article overall, though.

One of the best questions was in the comments. Is it okay to use pre=canned video to show your app? Suppose for pacing purposes you want to record your demo and then put it inside an annotated powerpoint. Anything wrong with that? I know I've tried that during training sessions on a couple of occasions and it actually went very well -- freed me up from doodling with the keyboard and let me focus more on my audience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com