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The point of PUCCKA was to develop a common methodology to make sure our whole team approaches sales with the same mindset and to give us a language to talk with each other about our prospects, as in, “have you identified your customers pain point yet?”. The goal is to get the customer speaking about their organization.
It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to influence journalists, business partners, potential employees, customers and VCs. So I thought I’d write a piece on how not to suck when you give a presentation. Show some energy! Oh wait, there is.
How does it meet customers’ needs? One way to approach that last question is to use this simple model: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) How will your business reach prospects? Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) How much money will your business generate from each converted customer? Please write us at blog@techempower.com !
The mistake entrepreneurs make is either writing a lengthy email (everybody has too much email so it will get skimmed / not digested) or not having a deck which means the VC can’t quickly determine his or her fit as a potential investor. If the investor spends all of his or her time staring at slides you’ve lost.
For extroverted people I recommend that entrepreneurs have an “executive summary&# slide up front that cuts to the chase. Don’t dwell on this slide for ever. If I have an hour with you I want to maximise the time we have a discussion so I want to get through the slides quickly. It’s in their personality type.
A perfect round number is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Most advisors will tell you to write the business plan first (20-30 pages), then distill the key points into a set of Microsoft PowerPoint slides for standup presentations to potential investors. Opportunity sizing.
Define your customers, partners and other relevant people to your organization (e.g. That’s blogging to the echo chamber unless they’re your target customers. Don’t just write a carbon copy of what somebody else is doing. I didn’t want to run out of things to write about in the first 6 months.
So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward. When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them. These are all creative processes.
It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to influence journalists, business partners, potential employees, customers and VCs. So I thought I’d write a piece on how to not suck when you give a presentation. One strategy I often employ.
Simply, this is identifying a customer need which has economic value to them if they can solve it. ” and if you can’t persuade enough potential customers they have some pain that needs fixing you probably should stick to your day job. Teams usually start with terminology that is very insular and less relevant to customers.
. - 500 Hats , July 30, 2010 Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009 - Business of Software Blog , May 4, 2010 Customer Development Checklist for My Web Startup – Part 1 - Ash Maurya , February 16, 2010 How-to learn about angel/vc term sheets - Gabriel Weinberg , June 28, 2010 Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and 9 Tips To Get Started - OnStartups (..)
.&# They know instinctually how customers buy and how to excite them. Because they’re street smart, most great entrepreneurs tend to prefer getting out and talking with real customers rather than sitting in a cubicle all day doing beautiful PowerPoint slides. They have a sixth sense for the competitors’ weaknesses.
Let’s assume you run a Customer Support software company. Do you simply begin by asking, “I’d love to understand what your objectives are in customer support? You need to identify a customer problem and talk about how your solution meets the needs of that problem. Where are your current pains?&#.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while and was going to use AngelList by Nivi & Naval as the basis for my example and the perfect prompt came yesterday when I read Fred Wilson’s blog post on AngelList. Anything requiring lead generation and/or customer acquisition I call Matt Coffin. Go get your anchors.
Whenever you write your deck and send it out I think you should actually think to yourself, “my competitors are probably going to read this one day and this will be forwarded widely” and if your response isn’t “so what!” There are a million ways to make graphics lighter or resize your file without a huge impact on the quality of the slides?—?after
Packaging, pricing & discounts – In the early days of my first company we always had “list prices&# we quoted to customers and of course we were always willing to negotiate based on who the client was, how important the business was to us, who the competition was and how well the deal was negotiated. I was the laggard.
If you’re an early investor like I am that often means writing the first $2-3 million check into a business that previously had either survived on fumes or on a $500,000 angel round. One of the interesting things about being a VC is that you often see companies in transition. Act your stage.
Another mistake many consultants make is to charge by the hour, and customers lose track and lose confidence as things change. Results” these days are not PowerPoint slides, or theories and recommendations. Speak to people, rather than write a document every time you want a change. Have "customers", not "clients."
Board meeting gets scheduled Nobody thinks too much about it until a week or two before Management team has a last-minute scramble to pull materials together Management is super focused on its daily work of … winning customers, signing biz dev, shipping product … so this prep is a last minute “fire drill” and is seen as a slight distraction.
A business plan is the outward facing definition of the business you hope to drive with your hardware solution, with a hardware overview in the intro to highlight customer value and competitiveness. Use non-fuzzy terms to quantify customer value. Provide specifics on the customer business model.
Even if it’s only a few PowerPoint slides or typed paragraphs, writing something down is the first step toward making it real. Always write in the future tense, what you will do, and name yourself as the key person responsible. The process will force you solidify the specifics, and mentally commit to them.
And after one meeting they started asking for his advice about marketing, customer engagement, product design, monetization – whatever. Chamillionaire has a way more refined sense of what customer behavior is like than most ivy league graduates with nice Powerpoint slides that I meet.
The size of the document should be based on your style, but 10-20 pages or slides are usually more than adequate to outline even a complex business. In fact, they are probably in such a hurry to give you money that they don’t want you to waste time writing anything down and passing it along to new investors.
In a two-minute video clip, you can introduce yourself, show your passion and the engaging personality you need to win over customers, partners, and employees. A perfect size is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Successful startups are all about the right people with the right stuff.
But if you want to level things up, you can use a platform like OptinMonster to create popup forms, sliding forms, floating bars, and sidebars. It integrates with OptinMonster, allows you to craft beautiful emails, and more importantly, enables you to create automated workflows without writing a single line of code.
They cite sources like the BusinessWeek story, “ Real Entrepreneurs Don’t Write Business Plans ” and this Forbes article. The size of the document should be based on your style, but 10-20 pages or slides are usually more than adequate to outline even a complex business. Writing it down promotes both understanding and commitment.
Another mistake many consultants make is to charge by the hour, and customers lose track and lose confidence as things change. Results” these days are not PowerPoint slides, or theories and recommendations. Speak to people, rather than write a document every time you want a change. Have "customers", not "clients."
People cite sources like this BusinessWeek story last year “ Real Entrepreneurs Don’t Write Business Plans ,” or even my own article a while back, “ 10 Reasons Not To Write A Business Plan First.” A perfect size is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Executive summary glossy.
They cite sources like a recent BusinessWeek story, “ Real Entrepreneurs Don’t Write Business Plans ” and this NY Times article. Of course there are scenarios where a written business plan is not critical, but I haven’t seen one yet where a well-written 15-page document, or at least a 10-slide pitch, is a negative.
People cite sources like this BusinessWeek story a while back “ Real Entrepreneurs Don’t Write Business Plans ,” or even my own article on this subject, “ 10 Reasons Not To Write A Business Plan First.” A perfect size is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Executive summary glossy.
Whether you are looking for partners, investors, or future customers, you need to show a level of professionalism and leadership very early that will draw people to your idea. You really need at least a prototype product or customer to make the video come alive. Make it light, but factual. Think of it as an infomercial.
In my experience, the key steps I look for always include the following: Testing the idea against customers who have money to spend. Writing down key parameters will force you solidify the specifics, and mentally commit to them. Prepare your marketing story for customers and investors.
He writes from first-hand experience, and is now a recognized business leader, motivational speaker, and mentor to many entrepreneurs. Don’t let yourself slide in making future commitments because these are the ones that can make you grow to the next level. In essence, you don’t want to risk getting pulled out of your comfort zone.
I have long advised startup companies that if you don’t control your messaging somebody else will and your potential customers will form impressions of you shaped by somebody else or by nobody at all. Send me in a corner to work on slides, graphs, spreadsheets and charts. I have published many of these PR Tips before.
Another mistake many consultants make is to charge by the hour, and customers lose track and lose confidence as things change. Results” these days are not Powerpoint slides, or theories and recommendations. Speak to people, rather than write a document every time you want a change. Have "customers", not "clients."
Another mistake many consultants make is to charge by the hour, and customers lose track and lose confidence as things change. Results” these days are not PowerPoint slides, or theories and recommendations. Speak to people, rather than write a document every time you want a change. Have "customers", not "clients."
Writing a business plan is hard work, so I get lots of pushback from prospective new venture founders that it’s just a waste of their valuable time in this rapidly changing environment. They all claim to have the plan in their head, and writing it down will only slow down their success.
If you were a newly minted, venture-backed consumer Internet company you had to have a deal with AOL to reach your customers. So along come companies like Slide, RockYou & Zynga who wanted to build apps across all the social networks but were green-lighted the hardest by Mark Zuckerberg. They controlled distribution to the masses.
Let me be quick to say that a plan doesn’t have be a book, and probably should start as a “pitch deck” of maybe a dozen slides which cover all the right bases. Since this document is outward facing, it is important to keep the terminology and tone consistent with that of your customer set, investors, and business partners.
If you provide these slides in advance you give board members a chance to reflect and come prepared for a real discussion. A board meeting shouldn’t be the place an investor questions why you’re focused on customers A and not customers B. The mistake most founders make is sending out last-minute board packs.
In a two-minute video clip, you can introduce yourself, show your passion and the engaging personality you need to win over customers, partners, and employees. A perfect size is ten slides, with the right content, that can be covered in ten minutes. Successful startups are all about the right people with the right stuff.
I talked about this in the TWiVC video but I didn’t do a good enough job of writing it up in the summary notes in the post. I think the norm in the industry is still to see Powerpoint slides and I wouldn’t hold this against anybody. I’m usually itching to just see what you’ve built. Mobile app? Bijan is right.
I had seen many cycles and decided that since I was going to do it all over again I should write about it. It included one firm who I asked not to call Salesforce.com as a reference (they were our largest pilot customer) and in their kindness they called Marc Benioff (the CEO) and asked his opinion. That changed very quickly.
aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. But I didn’t write it for you; I wrote it for myself. think his slides are great (and by far much easier on the eye then mine.).
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