Pitching Your Idea

I love the video Viafoura has created for pitching their idea. They use a classic approach that you can use for your own pitches:

1. The problem – What problem does your service solve from your customer’s perspective? (Digital publishers premium content is been used to build social media communities on someone else’s platform)
2. The solution – How does your service solve this problem? (Viafoura helps digital publishers create the same sense of community that users find compelling on social media platforms)
3. Features – What are the technology attributes of your solution that solve this problem? (Conversation widgets, curation widgets and reward mechanics)
4. Benefits – What are the benefits of using your service? (Increased customer loyalty – more page views, longer tome spent on the site, more return visits – leading to more revenue)

You can use this same methodology to pitch your idea:

“Our customer’s _______ (problem) will be solved by our ______ (solution) because of our _____________ (technology attributes) which leads to  ___________ (benefits)” (fill in the blanks)”

For example,

Digital publishers premium content is been used to build social media communities on someone else’s platform. Viafoura helps digital publishes create the same sense of community that users find so compelling on social media platforms through the use of conversation widgets, curation widgets and reward mechanics. The use of our Viafoura will increase customer loyalty: more page views, longer time spent on your site, and more return visits leading to increased revenue.

Get this pitch right and it should lead to more questions, like, what the heck is “reward mechanics”. But that’s what you want: more questions.

If you want you embellish your pitch even more, consider how you could add “proof points”, i.e. examples of how your solution (or maybe someone else’s solution in a similar context) actually produced the benefits described in your pitch.

Got an idea? Try to express it in the format above. The process will help you to flesh out your idea.

Next up: taking this one step further by structuring a hypothesis for your lean start-up.

– Chris