Better Pitching

Pitching, it’s the art of explaining something quickly and efficiently so that the listener buys into your idea. Asking your boss for time off at work? A client to buy more of a product or service? Your girlfriend to go watch Star Trek with you? You’re pitching.

The pitch people talk about most often in tech start-ups is the elevator pitch, which is a quick description of your company or product that should last less than the time it takes to ride an elevator — about half a minute.

Well, we have a product and I have an elevator pitch. It’s quick, it’s concise, and here it goes:

“So what do you do?”

“We have a product called NthCode Player, which is software home electronics companies can embed into televisions, set-top boxes, and other devices so that consumers can seamlessly find, stream, and play movies and music from their home networks and Internet services.”

“So … what do you do?”

Exactly. What do we do? No one understands. Here is a typical response:

“We are impressed, but we (I) just do not understand computer talk. So is this product for sale? I assume so. I hope you make big bucks!”

Okay, that’s not exactly typical, that’s a snippet of an email from my mother. If my mother — who other than being the greatest Mom on the planet is also a normal human being who sometimes reads my blog — says she doesn’t get it, then I have a problem.

And it wasn’t just Mom. It was also some of my geek friends. Pardon me, computer savvy professionals. I’d give them the elevator pitch, and, they, not wanting to look like idiots would try to understand it. “Oh, it’s kind of like X?” or “who are the customers?” and “what’s the business model?”

And it didn’t *feel* right in my gut. It was a bit of me thinking to myself, “Eh, that didn’t feel natural” and “what am I not saying right?”

So here are the symptoms of a bad pitch: People who should understand it are grasping to figure out what it is, it doesn’t feel right in your gut, and your Mom doesn’t get it.

What’s the solution: keep pitching, but keep changing it around — sooner or later, you’ll hit onto a way of pitching that works. That’s what I did, and now I have this:

“So what do you do?”

“It’s quite simple. All these television and set-top box companies are trying connect their devices to home networks and Internet services. We provide a software stack that does that.”

Ta-da!

And people get it.

Now I have a pitch I can build on.