Compelling Startup Pitch Archetypes (with examples from YC companies) | Hacker News Reader

Compelling Startup Pitch Archetypes (with examples from YC companies)

jasonshen.com

200 pointsjasonshen28 comments

Another one: high-margin city-level business that can be repeated in every big city in the world.

    Brick and mortar: Starbucks, Jamba Juice, McDonalds, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Kumon

    Online: Groupon, Uber, Yelp, RedBeacon, SkillShare, Thrillist

There are around one thousand cities with 1M+ population. If you can build something novel with 1M$ annual revenue and 20% profit margin that can be repeated for every big city, you can raise in order of 100M$ for global scaling.

If you follow Ries' definition (which seems to be the most accepted and popular), those don't count as startups though.

At some point they all were startups.

These companies follow very different trajectory than classic high-tech ventures. First, they raise little round to build a single city high-margin unique/defensible product. Then they raise big bucks to go global.

It's not about terminology. Local-to-global is an important and a bit YC-neglected strategy to build a great company that changes the world.

That's an interesting one. I didn't think much about local/brick and mortar businesses. I bet there's a whole other set of pitches that work for those.

City-level startup can be both online and offline.

Besides Groupon and Uber, there are 42floors, General Assembly, Skillshare, ThrillList, Yelp etc.

The thing about those is that ultimately the city-by-city approach is a distribution strategy. A single jamaba juice can exist on its own.

For Uber or 42Floors to succeed with venture backing, they really need to dominate a large market (like all major cities in the US). Thus the pitch still becomes much more high level and not focused on individual units.

Not to mention Craigslist.

Ok, that one is a keeper. :-)

One I've heard which isn't specifically mentioned is the 'Experience Twist' as in "A lot of people need to X and they do it but it sucks because it causes Y. We can do X with less Y."

"Traction" archetype also has an enterprise version: One or few highly successful enterprise deployments. E.g. you've solved a certain high value problem for a particular corporation and raising money to solve it for all companies.

Cloudera is a typical example. It went from Hadoop platform in Yahoo to Hadoop solutions for everyone.

Other companies who could have used this pitch: Bloom Energy, Yammer, PBWorks, GitHub, Box.net

Nice (and thanks for putting this together). Have to admit that as soon as I read "week over week" growth I was reminded of Demo Day Bingo [1].

[1] http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/demo-day-bingo/

Haha. Yes, there were a lot of startups pitching traction on Demo Day, and that makes sense because strong week over week growth is impressive, and most of them probably didn't good enough month over month numbers to pitch.

Another architype is Rethinking from Scratch.

Take a big market with a proven business model that failed to innovate for a long time. Recreate the product from the ground up.

    Cases: Tesla, Bank Simple, GMail, Lytro, iPhone

Great post, I think you nailed it. It's interesting how few archetypes there really are, unlike business models where it's very difficult to create any sort of encyclopedia because there's no clear taxonomy.

Business models are very well defined. The online business models are product/service sales, subscription, retail, commission, advertising and digital licensing.

The pitch types listed are a good start, but are neither mutually exclusive, nor wholly exhaustive.

As someone wanting to be better versed in business models, can you point our a resource that provides a clear taxonomy?

Business Model Generation[1] seems to be the canonical work about this sort of thing

[1] http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/

I think Jason deserves a big thanks from the HN community, immensely helpful stuff you've been putting out man!

Thanks so much Johnny! I've learned a ton from HN and try my best to share useful things with the community. Just signed up for the festivalist newsletter too, looks like an awesome project.

Awesome, don't see you in there though. We've been having some issues with TinyLetter's messages going to spam - if you have a chance, can you see if that happened to you too?

This the best article with a number in its title that I've read this year. :-)

(Although you clearly know the HN audience, having culled the number from the title here!)

Are they ranked by order of effectiveness?

I was thinking about doing that, but it really depends on what kind of company you are building and what stage you are at.

One thing Sam Altman has said which is interesting is about the order at which you pitch things. I'm not sure I totally agree but here's a paraphrase below:

Pitching revenue is best. If you can't pitch revenue, pitch users. If you can't pitch users, pitch product. If you can't pitch product, pitch market. If you can't pitch market, pitch team.

I'm glad you commented on this. This entire post is very timely, but I was just thinking about what to do if multiple archetype's apply to you. I'm guessing traction/revenue is almost always going to trump the others, but the idea of mixing a few of them together (without it becoming too confusing) seems like the better strategy?

Definitely many startups end up using several different angles over the course of a 30+ min conversation. I think generally you'll end up have one archetype that is really the most important.

Think about it this way - when someone asks the investor why they backed you, they are going to have a one sentence answer. "Because _____" What do you want that sentence to be? That is your archetype.

Good post, but I was expecting / hoping to see videos of these pitch archetypes in action or slide decks - did I miss something there?

I'd love to provide those, but they are few and far between. It would probably take me 2x longer to write this post if I had to unearth slide decks or videos for each pitch type. Hopefully the "what it sounds like" is enough to get you started.

Awesome post, thanks! FYI, the 6th Archetype has a trailing sentence at the end.

Woops! Thanks, fixed.

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