Journey To The First Pitch
Pitching, confidence and coming 11th in Lab353
What’s going on?
Since my last post, a lot of developments have, well, developed. The first is that, due to college and outside commitments, Bobby and Matthew stepped down from NativeNote, leaving myself, Colm and Mervyn. It was a heartbreaking moment for all parties involved but it was the best decision both for the individuals and the startup — it was just too much stress in an already stressful course.
Secondly, we’ve scrapped our initial MVP in favour of moving to a new, more secure, frame work — Laravel. We had originally started this as a side project and had thought the best approach was to build everything from scratch. We had our own custom CSRF protection, our own user registration system and we even wrote our own method of routing for the application. These are things that should set off flags in any developers head and we realise that now. Learning from our mistakes, I’ve fallen in love with Laravel’s workflow and MVC framework. It’s going to be a beautiful world from now on.
Thirdly, we had been invited up to Eircom’s headquarters in Dublin to pitch for the chance to be a part of the Lab353 Accelerator run by Eircom Business Ventures and SVG Partners. And so this post details our journey from couch to pitch and back again.
Preparing The Pitch
Honestly, there are so many wonderful guides online for creating a pitch-deck for various different reasons and contexts, I’m not going to talk much about that. Instead, I want to focus more on the pitch itself — That moment when you’re the centre of the attention while your ambitions and passions slide by behind you.
What we did was we created the pitch-deck and then did a blind run-through, noting good phrases we liked. Then Mervyn divided them up for each slide and we all worked collaboratively over Google Docs to refine and flesh out the pitch a little more. When we were happy with how the general outline worked, I began adding transitions and more comfortable language to each point. This stage in the process involved a lot of talking to myself and unstable arguments with the wall about what sounded better and more natural.
Practice
When we finalised the pitch, I did a read of it all to Mervyn and Colm with the slides going behind me. This session was focused on my inflection and how the language sounded out loud. While we were overall happy with everything, there were a couple minor changes we made based on what I stumbled over and some words that I might use but sounded a little out of place (hey, plethora’s a good word, okay?).
The next session was me pitching to the guys again but this time I had the transcript learnt off and was relying solely on memory. This one was all focused on me and not the pitch. I needed to be able to convey enthusiasm and a certain level of confidence. Certain lines had to be switched because they followed long, memory-intensive lines or because they didn’t fit where they were.
Finding Victims
The other guys don’t know this but I actually called two or three different people after I learned the pitch. I asked them to listen to me for just 5 minutes and let me know what they thought of my voice and my emotion. This was by far the hardest step in the process from couch to pitch. This was the first time I’d put myself outside of the shield of the company during the pitch and it was kind of uncomfortable and hard to do but I can’t deny that the adrenaline rush that my introverted soul felt afterwards was addicting.
Stress/Nervousness
So Thursday the 19th rolled around and we began our journey north. It most definitely did not help my nervousness that Mervyn almost missed the bus, arriving about 4 minutes before we set off. Not to mention the knot in my stomach kept contracting like my water was about to break and I’d go into labour at any moment. This is not a natural feeling for a 20 year old Irish male.
My mind kept repeating the lines over and over and over again. I spent two and a half hours chatting to Mervyn but a small part of my mind was repeating the slides in the back of my head the entire time. At times I lost track of the conversation because I’d gotten too sidetracked with remembering a certain part of the pitch.
We had agreed to do this pitch with no real intention of getting into the program. It was to be a test pitch in a low-stakes environment (for us) in preparation for the big pitches I’d eventually have to make as CEO. This amount of stress and nervousness was causing a physical strain on my body and that was the beginning of a vicious cycle where my nerves fed off the discomfort and pain and, in turn, my stomach grew worse with the nervousness.
Immediately After
I would love to share with you some tips on how I dealt with my nerves and became confident and powerful but, to be honest, I didn’t feel any relief in my nerves until I opened my mouth; “Sorry, I’m a little nervous… Hey, my name is Evan and I’m CEO of NativeNote.com. NativeNote is a…”
I’ve forgotten a lot of the details of what actually happened during the 10 minutes of our pitch. I drunkenly stumbled out of the room afterwards with my heart pumping and some bullet points highlighting what had just happened — They all smiled; our pitch was exactly 5 minutes long and their questions showed an understanding of, and interest in, our product.
There was nothing like that feeling of intense adrenaline I felt immediately afterwards. I’m a historically introverted person who’s only recently learned how to pretend like I’m not. This was a big, powerful, confident moment for me and I can’t describe how much that single moment has driven me in the past week to do so much more than I felt confident enough to tackle before. In that moment, I was unconquerable.
This Accelerator Goes To 11
Needless to say, we were very surprised to hear “NativeNote” come from the podium. They’d already gone through all of the 10 startups they picked, it was most certainly a mistake. I admit I had tuned out of the lead-up to the announcement but they mentioned college students and suddenly all eyes were on me. I shook peoples’ hands and handed over business cards. It was a surreal experience. I felt a little sick at the attention but it passed quickly as we were ushered out front to take promotional photographs. All I remember before we left the room was John Stanton (SVG Partners) telling me I had one of the best pitches of the day.
Outside, things were just as rushed as we were on a tight schedule to get a bus home. We’d originally planned to leave half-way through the closing ceremony as we were certain we wouldn’t be picked and an earlier bus sounded much nicer than a late-night one. When we tried to leave though, we were quickly coaxed back in for them to announce the winners. Now were outside, the 11th out of 10 winners. Having never been a fan of maths, it makes it all the easier to comprehend.
We did a series of action shots with Bill Archer and an oversized key. Then we left, smiles plastered across our faces.
Our Plans For The Future
So we’re taking part in the Lab353 program remotely from Cork and plan to embrace it wholeheartedly. We’re all mainly developers at heart and are looking for a lot of guidance on the business front and Lab353 has generously offered to help us accelerate our idea into the market. Although we still plan to launch officially in September for the new Academic Year, now we hope to be there with a fully fledged plan set out for the future and maybe a couple contacts to help us through the bumps in the road.
Development
As I mentioned at the start, we’re migrating to Laravel 5.0 and continuing to use Knockout.js to help build our views. With a proper templating engine, proper route definition and Models, Controllers and Views to work with, the sky’s the limit and I, for one, welcome our technological overlords. Colm has done a wonderful job of describing our technical future over in his post.
Press
Currently, our next immediate step is to leverage the Lab353 acceptance to get a bit more promotion locally and build awareness of ourselves. We want to build a community and to do that we need people willing to help us. We think a bit more press coverage of ourselves can help in that respect but we’re obviously still focused on building up groups slowly to begin with in order to ensure that network of knowledge is what’s really important.
The Vision
I’m more impassioned than ever. I sincerely believe we can breach the next horizon in how people collaborate and share knowledge within their college, their class or even in just a study group. We want you to share and learn. In the end, learning isn’t a spectator sport.
