Thank you everyone who attended the How to Start a Startup event. If you are reading this, please connect with Startup Iceland and Founder Institute Iceland, the community development pages. Our next meetup is a Startup Pitch Bootcamp on March 4th. You can register on this link. It is FREE to attend and we will walk you through what you need to focus on when you are creating your pitch and how to refine it. It is a workshop, so come ready to work on your pitch.
Pitching is storytelling. I have been to enough Seed Forums and Demo Days to say that this is one single thing that is within the circle of control of the founder to really hit it out of the park. Unfortunately not all founders are good storytellers or comfortable speaking in public. If you did not know people fear public speaking more than death! yep, death. What we want to do is create an environment which is friendly and consisting of peers and coaches to help you nail the different kind of pitches. We had a great talk about how to talk to investors as part of the How to Start a Startup lecture series hosted by Sam Altman. I believe you need to nail your elevator pitch i.e a 30 second pitch and maybe another format of a pitch. During the Startup Pitch Bootcamp session we will go through the tactics and strategies to really get your pitch right. In case you are wondering as part of the Y Combinator class the partners spend considerable amount of time with the class refining the pitch on demo day. I am also sure you have read everything there is to read about how to really communicate your idea clearly, but there is no substitute to actually doing it in front of a crowd. We are creating that environment. Oh! BTW, you need to pitch in English, I know I know we live in Iceland etc But if you are building a startup for the global marketplace you better know how to tell the story in English.
I am not saying that you don’t need to focus on building a great product or talking to your potential customer or building a great team and company. The first step is getting your story straight, clear, concise and intriguing i.e Storytelling. I believe it can be learnt and we are going to attempt to create an environment that encourages and teaches you how to nail this. To top it off it is FREE.
Here is a video of one of the most entertaining sales pitches I have seen:
