Two Minute Elevator Pitch

The Scenario

1. You find yourself, opportunistically, in an elevator all alone with potential Launch Clients, possible future employees, VCs, Angel Investors, Business Mentor or Coach.
2. You have two minutes to pitch your next great startup to them before they get off the elevator.
3. What do you do, what do you say?
4. Time yourself.

The Pitch

1. Introduce yourself.
2. Remember to smile.
3. Tell them what you are working on-give it a short title. ("The title can't be as long as the story, Bruce," Max Neutze.)

Example: "Hi, I am Mat Lafrance, President and CEO of a new service called gradeAstudent.com. We do on site computer repair for homes and businesses.

The computer repair industry is huge and growing faster than the installed base and the industry is full of 'mom and pop' shops-it also isn't an industry that any of the established players are interested in. We are tackling the last mile of service."

4. Tell them right away what the value proposition is.

Example: "You know people can either disassemble their PCs, put it in their cars, take it to a local repair shop, be told it'll take three weeks only to find out that it takes six weeks and costs 300 bucks and that their drives are wiped or they can log on to gradeAstudent.com, make an appointment and have a highly trained gradeAstudent come to their home or business and fix the problem in a couple of hours for $120."

5. Give them some idea of how big the opportunity is.
6. Also talk about the business model, your team, your technology, whether the opportunity is scalable and why you think you are going to be successful-what you actually bring to this.

Example: "What's neat about gradeAstudent.com is that we have designed GASnet, which basically matches the Student Contractors and the Clients-Clients give us a couple of windows when we can do a site visit and then our Student Contractors can log on to GASnet and take the jobs they want; maybe, for example, the ones closest to their homes. We have an endless supply of workers too-there are engineering and CS students in every major city. We're going to expand GAS with agents in major cities in North America and we can do eight or nine figures in revenues within seven years."

7. Finally tell them how you intend to drive sales-opportunities are useless if you have to spend $2m on SuperBowl commercials before you get your first sale.

Example: "Oh, I meant to say that we have proven we can get the word out about gradeAstudent.com using a Market by Media Release strategy-the media love our story. You can reach me anytime-my email address is mat@gradeAstudent.com or maybe I could call you? Could I have your business card and here is one of mine?"

8. Always reserve your domain name (and make it exactly the same as your company name) and print up business cards-hand them out like confetti.

Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Ottawa, Canada. November 24, 2002

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