Hi, I'm Nicole Glaros and I am a partner here at Techstars. I've been helping startups prepare their pitches for almost a decade and I'm here to help you guys learn how to craft an amazing elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch is a fundamental building block in communicating the value of your startup to others, but so many entrepreneurs suck at it.
Usually when an entrepreneur is giving their elevator pitch what most people hear is Hi, I'm the CEO of Blah Blah and my startup does blah blah blah with a little bit of AI and blah blah machine learning and cryptocurrency. Startups just haven't figured out how to use the communication and the language of the everyday people and I'm here to help you figure that out for your startup. So first of all, what is an elevator pitch?
An elevator pitch is simply one to two sentences that describes your business in 20 to 30 seconds max. That's a really short period of time for you to effectively communicate your business. And the goal of your elevator pitch is not only to get people to understand what your company does, but also get some level of engagement. You want them to ask questions, you want them to get excited.
And so what we're going to do will help you achieve both of those goals. Now first of all, you need to understand the framework. The framework is, for customers that have problem X, we provide solution.
So let me try that again because I know it's a little complicated. For customers, who have a problem, we provide a solution. Now let me give you some examples because I know that was a little abstract. Pana is a company that went through a Techstars program and I'm on their board, so I feel qualified to talk about this one. If I were delivering Pana's elevator pitch, what I would say is, for hiring managers that don't want to spend time booking or reimbursing travel, Pana is a chat-based travel concierge that allows candidates to book travel without the hassle of reimbursement or scheduling.
Notice that I had all three segments in there. Who the customer was, what the problem we were solving, and what the solution was. Here's another example from a Textars company. For homeowners that don't want the hassle of home maintenance, Prefix sends a maintenance crew to your house twice a year to do those annoying chores like clean out the lint from your dryer vent or change your air filter.
In both of these examples, notice that I don't say what the company does. Rather, I say how they do what they do. For example, I don't say that Panna is a travel concierge.
You might not know what that means. But what I do say is how they do what they do, that they leverage a chat-based interface. The how you do what you do is key to get people to understand what you do.
Now that you have the framework down, what I want you to do is write down five versions of this elevator pitch on a piece of paper. Practice those various versions with different people. You actually need to use a real audience to do this.
Use their feedback to tweak it. And you want to iterate on that pitch until you get it solid. Once it's solid, make sure that everybody on your team can say the elevator pitch in the exact same way every single time.
Once everybody can say it every single time, then I want you to start to pay attention to the questions that you get from people as you deliver your elevator pitch. Questions are an indication of A, how interested they are in what you're doing, but B, Also, where they're engaging and how clearly they understood the message of your elevator pitch. Once you get a sense of the questions that you're being asked consistently, I want you to practice those answers.
Oftentimes, that's the first point of engagement with a person where you're answering a question that they ask, and when you can answer that question solidly, it gives them confidence in you as an entrepreneur. So, in summary, your elevator pitch should be one to two sentences long and no longer than about 30 seconds. You want to iterate on it until it's solid. You want to make sure that everybody on your team has got the same consistent message, so practice until perfect. You want to practice your answers as well.
So if you have an extra 10 or 15 seconds, there are a couple extra pieces that you can add in that will add a little bit more color to your elevator pitch. One is what we call unlike. An unlike is just comparing you to the competition. So if I were to add an unlike to Panna's elevator pitch, what I might say is, unlike the hiring manager or travel agent booking the travel, PANA uses a chat-based tool to interface with a candidate, allowing the candidate's choice of travel to be used while the company is still paying for the travel. Another section that you can add to an elevator pitch to make it interesting is how you make money.
So if I was going to add this to prefixes, what I might say is, prefix makes money by charging homeowners an annual fee, allowing them to build all of the costs of their maintenance into one simple and easy to understand package for homeowners. And that is the formula for a perfect elevator pitch. My name is Nicole. Thanks for listening. Signing off.