3 Tips to Pitch. #19

LISA Cohort 7 Demo Day 3 is today! I am sure that our entrepreneurs are excited to share their progress and eager to hear valuable feedback from our advisors.? Our veteran advisors Alina Adams and Stephen A. have been constantly challenging our entrepreneurs, pushing them to develop their pitches, strengthen their value proposition, and, most importantly, prepare them to face the real world when they pitch their product to potential investors.

Demo Day is exciting! As Mentors, we see the progress of the cohort's products and pitches. Products taking shape, pitches clearly defining the MVP and solving their target customer’s pain point. Our entrepreneurs were given two minutes to present their pitch.?? At the end of the two-minute pitch, our advisors will share their feedback.? Attending both Demo days several themes surfaced and as our entrepreneurs prepare for Demo Day 3, a reminder of what we’ve heard and take into consideration as part of the next pitch would be helpful.

These are the topics that resonate throughout the feedback:

1)?? Build a comprehensive story, connect the audience to your passion, and what brought you to developing the product/service.

2)?? Articulate your target market (e.g., geography, customer profile, segment, age).

• Who are your customers? Define your customers, whether it’s a two-side marketplace or direct customers, identify and segment your customers.
• What is your customer story? Discuss your customer’s struggles, what are they doing, what are they not doing?
• Clearly define your customer segment, stratification helps better refine the go-to-market and customer acquisition strategy that would is unique for your business model.
• How will you find your customers, how will you scale??
• Do you have a customer or pilot in mind that you can start with?
• How will you enter the market? Where do you start?

3)?? Describe the product/ services and articulate the value proposition.? Whether it’s addressing/ fulfilling a gap, clearly differentiate your product/business from the marketplace, how are you different?

• Align the value proposition to the pain points of your customers. Highlight benefits, advantages and differentiating factors from competitors, clarify features
• Will the customers want this product?
• What will customers do with the product?
• What will customers be experiencing?
• How important is the product/ service/ offering to the customer?
• How will the mechanics of the product/ service/ offering work?
• What is the hypothesis that you are trying to validate?
• Provide case studies, use cases, pilots
• Incorporate the results of testing, share feedback received from customers

4)?? Competitive Analysis? - describe existing solutions and competition from other services

• Who’s doing it?? What are the alternatives?
• How are you different from your competitors?
• What are your competitors doing? What are they not doing?
• How are you solving the gap based on what competitors are providing today?
• Why is the gap not solved?
• Are you catering to new markets? New players?
• Highlight the advantages of your product, this can include articulating your team’s expertise in building the product, the technology, machine learning model used to develop the product.

5)?? Revenue Generation

• What does the revenue model look like? How will you make money?

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Our advisors also provide presentation tips to the first-time founders:

• Make sure that the slides are not too busy, this allows the reviewers to focus and get their undivided attention.
• While good visuals are appealing, make sure that the visuals do not distract your listeners from your pitch.?

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Best of luck to our Demo Day 3 presenters!

LISA's team is looking forward to hearing the last round of feedback!

By Pamela C. , Mentor at LISA - Stanford GSB LEAD Incubator & Startup Accelerator