Amazing startup pitches (Loopt, Mint, Dropbox, etc) [videos] | Hacker News Reader

Amazing startup pitches (Loopt, Mint, Dropbox, etc) [videos]

jonbischke.com

118 pointskareemm21 comments

There are good ones, but mostly I think the pitch process is overated. Nothing like a good intro from good friends. Of course, nobody tell you that, coz' that's a little dirty secret.

The word 'pitch' is a little overloaded in my experience. Some people use it to mean 'product demo' and others use it to mean 'investor presentation'. I'd say most of these were product/company demos aimed at the press and potential customers, with a sprinkling of investor hookage, as in 'if you're an investor think this is cool talk to us to find out more about the business side'.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with demoing the product as a first step to getting an investor's interest, but a lot of the 'pitch training' or 'how to pitch your startup' type posts, seminars, workshops etc focus on what an investor wants to hear. Which is also called a pitch. One of the most common mistakes to make during this type of pitch (based on my experience, er, making said mistake) is to talk way too much about the product and tech and not enough about how the investor is going to get rich and retire to the Bahamas if they invest in you. Of course this varies tremendously by investor. The "pitch" at a YC interview is not going to start off with "Well, our total available market is $25 billion, and...".

The reason I mention this is because the two types of pitch are just commonly confused. For example at FOWA London, there was a pitching session on stage where three companies did a product pitch to the audience (the session was called Launch! iirc) and the judges made comments as if it were an investor pitch, which was a little unfair on the companies. They all took it gracefully, though.

tl;dr - Pitch can mean more than one thing. Know your audience (and judges if necessary)!

Holy cow that's a big ask at the end of the Michael Prichard pitch, but man, best of the bunch. He told us what the problem was. He personalized. Why HE had to solve it. He ate his own dog food (literally). Explained how it would change lives / the size of the market / competition. And then finished with his ask. Not that he was actually asking, but that is a better pitch than all the rest.

One thing that got me about a lot of the others, they just didn't feel practiced. If they were, it was not enough. Practice, practice and practice some more and when you think you've nailed it ... do it again ... twice. :)

I thought the demo for Admob was extremely compelling and executed perfectly. If you only have time to check out one of the great videos on there then go for that one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7E5PosTG2U

It's a shame it was edited though. As it's hard to really get a feel for the flow due to the weird cuts. Of course, it might have been too long without it. :)

What was really successful about his pitch though was his tone. He is VERY believable. He comes off as so true. Add to that the fact that he told us that we was only going to cover three things and then nailed them, and man, that's a nice pitch.

I thought it was ironic that Loopt was using Microsoft Maps in the demo for the iphone, anyone know why they chose Virtual Earth over GOOG?

At that time, Apple hadn’t made Google Maps a part of its SDK offering. IIRC, there was a (maybe open source?) third-party kit for integrating MS Virtual Earth into iPhone apps, which might have been what they were using for this demo.

this is now my homepage. thanks for sharing.

thanks. this is very helpful.

To the people downvoting this: what is your problem? The guy is being nice and saying thanks, and you're downvoting him to -4?

What if everyone posted a similar contentless "thanks" post on every article they found interesting? Such posts would dominate the comments. There's already a "thanks, this is very helpful button" -- it's called the up arrow.

EDIT: I'm not trying to troll here, I'm serious -- do you think comments like this add something to a discussion?

Experience shows they're harmless.

New users are explicitly told such comments are ok: http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

If everyone would do that, then that would be a problem. However, not everyone is doing it and it doesn't seem like more people are starting to do it. It's just not necessary to downvote superfluous comments; not getting any upvotes is enough of a signal.

You could just upvote the "thanks, this is very helpful" comment...

I've been noticing many acceptable comments being downvoted a lot recently.

A five-word upvote is not an acceptable comment.

Guilty as charged, let me explain why. When this was posted first, it looked like a pattern I've seen before on HN, some spammer posts a link and then uses a sockpuppet (or more) make it seem as though the content is great.

For another example of that see here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=941568

So I was a bit quick on the trigger there. On the other hand, if I would have been able to undo my vote (reddit style) I would have done so.

edit: it seems quite arbitrary to single these out for being modded down, there are much better examples of good contributions that got dumped on.

You can tell they're not sockpuppets by the account ages. In the situations you're talking about, the accounts are mostly new.

In this case, yes, but I only clued in to that later.

The link I posted above I would say is definitely a spammer+sock puppet or at least an acquaintance of a spammer.

I down-voted it for poor punctuation.

This is not a startup pitch, but it's also helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-ntLGOyHw4

Reply on news.ycombinator.com