Why NOT Preparing is the Key To Winning a Startup Competition
In college, I was the worst crammer. I tried hard to spend the last few hours before a final going through the book one more time. I always wanted to pull an all-nighter studying, but inevitably I fell asleep by 2am and remembered nothing I studied the night before. No matter what I did, cramming never seemed to work for me. It probably didn’t work for you, either.
As it turns out, cramming has been proven ineffective. It simply doesn’t work:
When you are “craming”, you are essentially reading a list of facts to yourself and trying to commit them to memory. Unfortunately most of these things won’t actually be committed to memory and will be forgotten in a few hours. This is not to say that you won’t remember anything. Chances are good that come test time, the things you studied at the beginning of your “cram” session will be recalled, and some of the things at the end of the “cram” session will be recalled. The majority though, will be lost among many other post-it notes in your brain.
The exact same thing happens in startup pitches, such as at a startup competition. Startup founders who spend a day or two cramming their pitch will ultimately perform worse than those who simply don’t prepare at all.
How we won Seattle Beta
I was reminded of this fact this week when our startup was one of the pitching companies at the Seattle Beta event. We found out we were selected to present just last week so we had very little time to cram in the first place. On top of that, I don’t consider myself to be a great presenter in general — I’m your classic engineer and I’d much prefer a conversation with two or three smart and interesting people than presenting to a few hundred people at once.
Just to add to the impossibility of preparing, we didn’t even understand the format of the event. We missed attending the first event a few months ago so it was unclear to us whether there were pitches with slide decks in front of the entire crowd, or a panel of judges, or something else.
We started by reaching out to one of the pitching companies from the event a few months ago (thanks, Buster and Jen of Habit Labs!), who told us that Seattle Beta is an informal event, where pitching startups get a table to set up a laptop/demo and attendees can drop by any or all of the demos as they wish. We found out this formula about a day before the event; not exactly a lot of time to prepare.
The best part about this story is the fact that not preparing for this presentation led to us winning the People’s Choice Competition as the audience’s favorite startup! We’re very excited about this, and I definitely owe a bunch of thanks to my co-presenter and teammate, Brett Nakashima.
Why preparing doesn’t work
Truth be told, even if we did have a long time to prepare, we probably still wouldn’t have. The reality is you either know your product cold, or you don’t. If you’re preparing just before a presentation, you’re just memorizing facts. In fact, you’re probably memorizing a speech, word for word.Know your product before you pitch
If you don’t know your product and industry cold, you shouldn’t be out pitching your product yet; you should be out talking to potential customers understanding where their pain is and how you’ll remove that pain. In today’s startup world, where you can reach hundreds or thousands of potential customers within a few weeks, there’s simply no excuse not to have a firm grasp on exactly the problem you’re solving. A startup competition pitch is the wrong place to be discovering your problem, product, customers, etc. You need to know each of these before you pitch.Don’t speak *TO* your audience, speak *WITH* them
Study after study has shown that people will like you (and, therefore, your product) more if you simply let them do the talking (see How to Win Friends and Influence People). I’m not suggesting a startup competition is the place to let your audience do all of the talking, but take a bit of time to be friendly and listen to them. Shake their hand, introduce yourself personally, learn their name. Then give them your pitch, and let them ask questions. Then ask them some questions (“are you in the mobile space?,” “where do you work currently?,” etc). Listen to their answers and feed off that to continue the conversation.If you prepare, you’re memorizing. Memorizing fails when curveballs are thrown
When you prepare a pitch, you’re really just memorizing a script. Memorizing a script means you don’t innately understand your product, market, and customer. When a potential customer asks a question that is outside of your script, you’ll fall apart. Spend the time learning everything about your product rather than memorizing a script.By not preparing, we had no opportunity to memorize a script. We know our product and market, so we were able to get out there and field any and all curveball questions. In some cases, the answer was a simple, “we don’t know yet, but here’s our hypothesis.” Even in that case, we showed that while we may not have all the answers, we’ve done our research and have a vision for the future.
Pitches are a reflection of who you really are
Perhaps most importantly, a pitch should be a reflection of who you are. Think about DHH: every talk he gives is riddled with cursing and rants. Or Rand: every talk is filled with emotion, humor, transparency, and data. That is exactly who those two presenters are in real life.If, instead of being who you really are, you pitch in a fake voice, you’ll fail. You have to be authentic and genuine in order for your audience to take you seriously, which means being yourself. Don’t try to be Steve Jobs, just try to be yourself.
In our case, that meant being friendly, smart (at least in Brett’s case!), and genuinely enthusiastic about mobile app marketing and empowering developers to build successful app businesses.
The exceptions
There are always exceptions to a rule, and this is no different.No questions allowed
If you’re speaking to a group of people and no questions will be taken, memorizing a script and a deck may make sense. No one can throw a curveball at you so you don’t have to worry about the areas you don’t understand and can focus your presentation only on the areas you do.
Your lead time is long
If you have a few months to practice your pitch, you’ll be much better off. For example, TechStars pitches on Demo Day are always great, because they spend almost three months constantly practicing and getting feedback.Really this is just another way for the TechStars teams to learn their product and market inside and out, by getting feedback from mentors, investors, customers, and other teams. It just happens to be that they are preparing their pitch while doing so.
One and done
In an event like we participated in, where we pitched probably 40 or 50 times, having a script to follow could have been a disaster. We would have been so burnt out that we probably would’ve ended the night with no emotion. Or, if it wasn’t working, we wouldn’t have been able to change it up midway through the night.If you’re presenting just once, however, preparing a script might allow you to hit on everything you want to say without forgetting anything.
