The 2 Minute Pitch – How to Perfect Your Pitch in 2 Minutes
As usual, I read a great article via Medium, titled “What to include in your 2-minute startup pitch.” The post is a summary taken from blog article written for thinkapps. You can read the full entire article here. The blog post discusses some key factors in helping startup founders and entrepreneurs, pitch their product/or company. One of the differential elements that is discussed is narrowing your pitch to 2-minutes – thus the ‘2 Minute Pitch.’ The method on how best to get the pitch down, is explained by Michael Seibel, partner at Y-Combinator – one of the top startup accelerators out in Silicon Valley (you can read about YC from a previous post of mine here). I’ve gone ahead and summarized Michael’s points, a long with adding a little bit of analysis of my own afterwards below:
1. What is your unique insight?
What are you bringing to the table that your competition isn’t? What is your “secret sauce”?
Whatever you call it, this is the part where you want to tell the investor something you know about your industry and business that they don’t know. Their ideal expression should be kind of an ah-ha face. This one can be two sentences.
2. How do you make money?
Founders can be weird about this point, especially if the answer is advertising. But it’s best not to beat around the bush or sugarcoat it because then it just seems like you have no idea how you’re going to make money.
3. Who’s on your team?
To investors, the best achievements of the people on your team are going to be the ones that made investors money, seeing as they’re also investors who want to make money. Even if you don’t have that on your founding team’s résumé, do not resort to listing PhDs.
The investor wants to know how many founders you have; preferably between two and four. They also want to know: how many are technical and how many are business-oriented? And, how long have you known each other and how did you meet?
4. The “Big Ask”
Up until now, you’ve gone easy on the jargon, keeping things super simple and clear. But this is the part where that jargon comes in handy, because it’s important to talk about money in a way that’s clear you understand it.
Some of the things you should know are if you’re raising on a safe or a convertible note, how much money you’re raising and what is the minimum check size. And if you don’t understand these terms, make Google your new best friend.
I know what some of you may be thinking, ‘Holy Cow! Is this even possible?!’ – The answer must be yes. If this was an impossible feat, you wouldn’t have a VC advocate it. I think Michael Siebel is genius for providing this. Narrowing down your pitch in 2 minutes or less is something that all entrepreneurs should try to master. This enables you to know your story from head to toe, and to be ready to explain it in a short period of time so that it gets effectively presented and can grab your audience’s attention. I’m no expert, but I believe that with a little practice, you can master this task. So next time before you have a pitch presentation, try practicing on getting it down to 2 minutes. You may be surprised.
I’ll end it with a quote from Michael:
a 10-minute pitch is a waste of time and you should be able to get it all done in two minutes, even when talking to investors. – Michael Seibel
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