How did we win pitch off battle at in-ference

I am delighted to share with you the news that jury of in-ference in Wroc?aw has chosen Digital Fingerprints and Susan from Handerek Technologies as winners of Pitch-Off competitions. We will be going to TechCrunch 2019 in San Francisco.

After we came back to the office, I got a lot of questions. How was it? Was that any different from your previous pitches? What have you changed?

Below you can find some of the tips that we have used.

Listen

In the morning organisers of conference divided us into several groups that worked on improving the pitch. I had a pleasure to meet  Bastian Kuntzel that shared with us some of the most critical points

Problem first

Use case

Describe the use case. What is the issue that you are solving? Do it as simple as possible. It is a human to a human relationship where building rapport and understanding is required to induce empathy.

For us, it is Account Takeover and Session Takeover.

Size

How big is the problem? Can you quantify it? Is it worth to do something with it? That is the place to show that you’ve learned your lesson and got some numbers. Market size, problem size, predictions by known analyst companies. Everything matters.

For me, it was the amount of money lost because of stolen credentials last year. It was $3 B. Huge enough.

According to Markets and Markets size of behavioural biometrics market will reach 2.5$ B by 2023.

Solution

Explain how you want to solve it.

Being a geek, I love to call what we do as: “Human-Computer Interaction” based contextless Behavioural Biometrics. Sounds sexy? Too complicated? Probably for a general audience. Less for strategic investors

Over the time I’ve learned that it is way better when more people understand it roughly than an only small amount of listeners could get what I present precisely.

We look at the way you interact with devices such as mouse, touchpad, touchscreen or keyboard. Based on that we build mathematical models that reflect your behaviour.

How do you sell it

Is it B2B or B2C or B2B2C? What is the model of sales? Do you have any traction? What are the reasons that people would like to sell it?

For Digital Fingerprints requirement of PSD2 for “Strong Customer Authentication” is one of the pushes that move the industry towards our solution. For now, we sell our solution as a Service billed per end user monthly with an additional variable fee for infrastructure.

We have the traction of multiple institutions that would like to fight against:

• Friendly frauds
• Stolen Credentials
• Frauds
• Account Takeover 
• Session Takeover

What do you need

Money

How much. That generally sends a signal to investors that have a specific range of tickets. If you are an early stage, some funds or angels will be happy with that. If you grow, Venture Capital will be glad to talk to you. Going global? Private Equity or Corporate Venture Capital may be the way to move on.

Smart money

Everything else that you might get thanks to your investors. In the end, it reduces the amount of money that you will burn. I recognise it as:

• Door opening to your potential customers
• Mentorship
• Support in Media
• Technological support
• Human Resources
• Experience

Stomp

Have a slogan at the end. Something that people will remember that will sum up your presentation. I adapt it depending on the audience. Sometimes a question is an excellent call to action. “Would you like to start protecting your customers?”. For a general audience, I prefer sticking to the features of the product and simplifying it.

At the conference, I was the last competitor after 9 p.m. and people were quite sleepy. Take a look what have I done to wake them up.

Summary

It was a great event. We loved the talk of Tomasz Nietubyc about crowdfunding as much as coffee provided by Etno Cafe.

Dermot exploded on stage with energy. John was trying to crystalise a truth related to investments from VC representatives.Thank you all for organising the event. You can find the full list of speakers here.

Have you found here something that needs more explanation? Got some feedback?

Let us know in the comments. Thank you for supporting us. See you next time from Mateusz and Gosia.

Cross posted with https://fingerprints.digital/we-won-pitch-off-battle-at-in-ference/

Just be yourself and stay protected.