GleepLog

UPDATE: Like my pitch, this blog post has iterated due to feedback.

I’ve had the great fortune of being able to pitch my company OtherNumber in front of large audiences three times in the past 3 weeks.  First there was Startup Riot, then Startup Atlanta #OnStage and then there was This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis.

It was, in a word, fantastic.

I was not a stranger to public speaking but until recently I had only spoken at conferences and in academic situations.  I had never had as much at stake as I did when when pitching OtherNumber.

StartupRiot

Was I nervous at StartupRiot?  Hell Yes.  There were 400 people in the audience and bright lights shining on the stage.  Robert Scoble and Bo Peabody were there! CNN was milling around.  It was the first big exposure for my company.  I was properly freaked out.

I came up with a 4 slide deck.  I wrote some copy.  I practiced it.  It sucked.  I talked to people, I got some feedback.  I ignored it for a while.  I picked it up again.

It still sucked.

It was 2 days to StartupRiot.  Too late to change the slides.  That’s when I saw a reminder that Startup Gauntlet was happening the day before StartupRiot.  I signed up immediately.

That was a tremendous help to me.  Keith McGreggor, Paul Freet and Jeff McConnell gave me great feedback on the content of my pitch and my delivery.  They all said I came off flat, probably due to nerves but they knew I was passionate about my company.  Jeff told me “Be the Twitter Guy!” because my tweets were so much more passionate than the pitch I gave.

That night I stayed up way too late and re-tooled my pitch again, focused on the specific points they gave me at the gauntlet and it was a huge improvement. I focused on the the major advantage my solution had over hardware PBX platforms (something I had almost completely neglected to mention before) and avoided saying the phrase “Asterisk in the Cloud” because even now I can’t say that without tripping over my tongue.

The morning of the event I kept re-working the text.  I put it in a Google Doc and sat there staring at it on my phone while pacing around the Fox Theater complex.  I knew what I had to do.  I just still wasn’t sure if I could do it.

Then Jeff McConnell gave me some words of encouragement before the event got started.

“Of the 50 pitches there will be a bottom 5.  You won’t be in that group.”

That helped me quite a bit because I realized that was what I had really been afraid of.  Nobody wants to be the pitch everyone remembers for all the wrong reasons.  Once he told me I wasn’t going to be one of those I relaxed a bit.  And you know what? He was right!  OtherNumber finished 4th in the voting!

I highly recommend that any entrepreneur in the Atlanta area take their pitch to Startup Gauntlet to get feedback.  The “Dungeon Masters” are incredibly helpful, smart and experienced.

I’ll cover StartupAtlanta #OnStage and #Twist in a series of posts later.