I love the concept of an 'Elevator Pitch.'
It's a fantastic mental exercise for you as a founder and one that is very commonly overlooked
So what is an elevator pitch?
It's a short description of an idea, product, or company.
It's meant to be shorter than an elevator ride, meaning, 30 seconds or less.
The concept also applies to pitching yourself, as an individual, to introduce yourself and
or land a job- but we'll be focusing on the company/startup version of this.
An elevator pitch should be enough to explain your startup idea and leave the investor
curious for more.
Now, this is not to be confused with the concept of a pitch deck.
What is a pitch deck?
A 10-15 slide presentation to introduce a business proposal- mostly associated these
days with an investor pitch deck.
If you are looking for that, we have a couple of videos focusing on pitch decks, as well
as a neat pitch deck template, which you will find in the description.
Back to the elevator version: in this video, we are going to look into some tactics to
approach writing your elevator pitch, lessons learned.
Then I'll take a stab at writing some elevator pitch examples from companies you are probably
familiar with.
This is, Elevator Pitch Examples for Startups
Let me give you my Elevator Pitch first, and then we'll break it down.
Do you ever need to make slide presentations?
(I'll assume you said yes).
How long does it usually take you?
(Insert any answer here, it's probably going to be hours).
We discovered that the reason why it takes so long is that all presentation platforms
give you a white canvas: you need to figure out the content of the deck while figuring
out how it's going to look. All at the same time.
It's just very inefficient- and if you're not a designer, your slides might not look too good.
So we created Slidebean, a tool where all you need to do is add the content, and the
design of the slides gets generated automatically.
Over 10 million slides have been created with our platform.
So here's a quick teardown.
Starting with a question.
We have the advantage of tacking a problem that most people in an office have experienced.
We can 'bet' that the answer to the first question will be 'yes'.
And that the answer to the second question will be a lot of time.
The question also allows you to turn this into a [controlled] conversation rather than
just a one-way pitch.
The focus here is to be relatable- to speak to a problem that the potential customer or
potential investor will probably have experienced.
Not all companies can get away with this- but try to find something that applies to
your business.
Slidebean is visual.
It's a lot easier for me just to show you how it works, but I can't do that in the elevator.
Notice how I mostly focused on this problem/solution combination.
This is what an elevator pitch is mainly made up of- it's a teaser of the company, enough
to get people interested.
Notice how I didn't use any fancy terms like Artificial Intelligence, online collaboration,
viewer tracking.
Too many tech terms put together sound like jargon.
You might or might not want to share details about customers and revenue, but showcasing
A metric that gives a sense of the scale of the business is pretty useful for your credibility.
Now- moving into elevator pitch examples.
If you run a Google search for this term, you'll hopefully come across this video.
But beyond that, there are a bunch of articles from different sources, showing some examples.
None of them stood up- so I figured we could imagine how the Elevator Pitches of some popular
startups would have looked.
Let's do Airbnb.
Again, assuming that this is being pitched in 2009- with the information available on
their original pitch deck, which we will link below.
We connect travelers and real estate owners to...
Wait.
Remember- casual, no jargon.
Conversation-like.
Here we go again.
Most tourists booking online care about price- and hotels are one of the highest costs for
when traveling.
On the other hand, platforms like Couchsurfing have proven that over half a million people
are willing to lend their couches or spare bedrooms.
We have created a platform that connects travelers with locals, letting them rent our rooms or
even entire places.
Travelers save money, and locals can monetize their empty rooms- we just take a 10% commission.
How does that sound?
A few pointers here.
Notice how I started mentioning tourists, not just any traveler.
Airbnb doesn't necessarily target business.
It's easy to agree that people looking to travel care about price, so there's no market
research or validation needed to come up with that statement,
On the other hand, it might be arguable that people will be willing to rent out their homes
to strangers.
I used the Couchsurfing validation to avoid that statement being questioned.
Now let's do WeWork.
Once again, this is based on the company stage they had by the time they made this pitch
deck.
Here we go,
There are 40MM independent workers in the US: consultants, freelancers, and small business
owners.
Solving office space is tough and expensive, especially in cities like New York.
We created the concept of space as a service.
We have 20 locations in the city- where people can rent a desk or an office without any of
the complications of a traditional lease, effectively saving at least 25% of the cost.
They get access to a shared front desk, mailroom, and a community of like-minded people.
Finally, taking a stab at Slack.
There is no publicly available pitch deck for Slack, but let's assume the company is
just starting up.
The average office worker receives 304 emails per week.
They also attend an average of 62 monthly meetings, half of which they consider 'wasted
time'.
Slack was made to make work more efficient.
It organizes conversations by channels and drastically reduces the need for emails or
meetings.
It's integrated with 100s of productivity tools like Google Docs, Calendars, Email,
Dropbox, Zoom... so you can receive automatic notifications and take action without leaving
the interface.
I wrote these for the script but if you have better suggestions, go ahead and leave them in the comments.
OK, now two new features and changes for today's video.
First, I am totally out of T-Shirts.
I've used up every single shirt in my closet, and I can't keep up with our videos anymore.
I'm wearing Aviato today, and I figured I'd ask you guys for startup swag.
If you ship me your startup tee- I'll wear it one of my next videos and then you'll get your brand out there.
How does that sound?
Second, we are going to
start answering your questions at the end of each video.
Feel free to drop them in the comments
and we'll pick 3 and answer them every week. Here we go.