Read Online Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat - Free Book Online Page B
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It's Friday night at 9 PM, and you're in a room packed with strangers. The boxes of pizza were emptied long ago and are now piled up in a corner, but a few people are still clutching (albeit warm) beers. It's loud in this Manhattan loft space. It's hot, too, and frankly, people are starting to smell a little. But you hardly notice. And you definitely don't make a move for the door. Instead, you try to carry on intense, vocal-cord-straining conversations about business ideas and computer coding, advertising and customer bases, venture capital and what entrepreneurial success looks like. You search, sometimes in vain, for the people you watched a few minutes ago trying to sell you their ideas. And you try to find people who are interested in your ideas. You are holding up pizza boxes with the name of your future company, writing with magic marker on the backs of paper plates and throwing them like Frisbees into the crowd—doing anything you can to make yourself stand out in this chaos.
Just a few minutes ago, there was some order in this room. You were patiently lined up along the wall with 30 other people, waiting to pitch an idea for a new business in 60 seconds. Even after 75 pitches, there was virtual silence when each person began to talk. When you looked over at the line snaking down the hall, you saw some people fidgeting, tucking in their shirts, and smoothing out their hair. Some were taking notes. Others were trying to memorize lines like they were auditioning for a Broadway play.
And you were asking yourself some questions, too: Should you try to be funny or serious? Who should you look at? Should you tell them about what you do during the rest of your life? Will anyone care? Should you mention how many other events like this you've come to? Will your accent be too heavy? Will you talk too loudly or not loudly enough? Sixty seconds, you begin to think, just isn't very long.
The Magic of 60 Seconds
When we set out to design the course of events at Startup Weekend, we didn't just pick 60 seconds arbitrarily to give people a hard time or because we like seeing that look of panic come over their faces when they notice the clock running out (though it is a little funny.) We wanted to be practical: No one would be able to go home on Friday night if we let all the people who wanted to pitch ideas go on any longer than that.
However, there was an even more important reason: 60 seconds is about the length of time you have in an elevator to explain the concept of your company to a total stranger (even less, if you get out on a lower floor). After that minute is up, you'll start to lose someone's attention. Even if you have a scheduled meeting with someone that's longer, the advice your seventh-grade teacher gave you is right: The topic sentence and the introductory paragraph need to be great. People will tune out if you can't grab their interest with the first few words that come out of your mouth.
So it's best to make those 60 seconds count. Here is the advice we give to participants in what we like to call “Friday Pitchfire” about the questions to answer in order to use their time wisely:
5 to 10 seconds: Who are you?
10 to 20 seconds: What's the problem your product/service solves?
10 to 20 seconds: What's your solution?
5 to 10 seconds: Who do you need on your team?
It's been our experience that participants tend to focus too much on the first one: Who are you? When you're pitching an idea for a startup company, the audience does want to know something about you—if you have had experience in the field. For example, a guy who wanted to launch a company that would send kids a surprise toy in the mail each month said that he had worked in the toy industry, which of course gave him some credibility. But people at our events don't much care where you went to school,
It's Friday night at 9 PM, and you're in a room packed with strangers. The boxes of pizza were emptied long ago and are now piled up in a corner, but a few people are still clutching (albeit warm) beers. It's loud in this Manhattan loft space. It's hot, too, and frankly, people are starting to smell a little. But you hardly notice. And you definitely don't make a move for the door. Instead, you try to carry on intense, vocal-cord-straining conversations about business ideas and computer coding, advertising and customer bases, venture capital and what entrepreneurial success looks like. You search, sometimes in vain, for the people you watched a few minutes ago trying to sell you their ideas. And you try to find people who are interested in your ideas. You are holding up pizza boxes with the name of your future company, writing with magic marker on the backs of paper plates and throwing them like Frisbees into the crowd—doing anything you can to make yourself stand out in this chaos.
Just a few minutes ago, there was some order in this room. You were patiently lined up along the wall with 30 other people, waiting to pitch an idea for a new business in 60 seconds. Even after 75 pitches, there was virtual silence when each person began to talk. When you looked over at the line snaking down the hall, you saw some people fidgeting, tucking in their shirts, and smoothing out their hair. Some were taking notes. Others were trying to memorize lines like they were auditioning for a Broadway play.
And you were asking yourself some questions, too: Should you try to be funny or serious? Who should you look at? Should you tell them about what you do during the rest of your life? Will anyone care? Should you mention how many other events like this you've come to? Will your accent be too heavy? Will you talk too loudly or not loudly enough? Sixty seconds, you begin to think, just isn't very long.
The Magic of 60 Seconds
When we set out to design the course of events at Startup Weekend, we didn't just pick 60 seconds arbitrarily to give people a hard time or because we like seeing that look of panic come over their faces when they notice the clock running out (though it is a little funny.) We wanted to be practical: No one would be able to go home on Friday night if we let all the people who wanted to pitch ideas go on any longer than that.
However, there was an even more important reason: 60 seconds is about the length of time you have in an elevator to explain the concept of your company to a total stranger (even less, if you get out on a lower floor). After that minute is up, you'll start to lose someone's attention. Even if you have a scheduled meeting with someone that's longer, the advice your seventh-grade teacher gave you is right: The topic sentence and the introductory paragraph need to be great. People will tune out if you can't grab their interest with the first few words that come out of your mouth.
So it's best to make those 60 seconds count. Here is the advice we give to participants in what we like to call “Friday Pitchfire” about the questions to answer in order to use their time wisely:
5 to 10 seconds: Who are you?
10 to 20 seconds: What's the problem your product/service solves?
10 to 20 seconds: What's your solution?
5 to 10 seconds: Who do you need on your team?
It's been our experience that participants tend to focus too much on the first one: Who are you? When you're pitching an idea for a startup company, the audience does want to know something about you—if you have had experience in the field. For example, a guy who wanted to launch a company that would send kids a surprise toy in the mail each month said that he had worked in the toy industry, which of course gave him some credibility. But people at our events don't much care where you went to school,
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