Last year, our Show HN post made it to the coveted #1 slot and snagged over 700 upvotes. Last month, we took first place in Stanford’s annual startup competition. Along the way, we picked up a few tips about Hacker News success, pitch competitions, and startup life in general. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
“There are no universal truths, except of course for this one” — Anonymous
The HN Effect
Good traction on HN is perhaps the best currency in Silicon Valley. Nothing gets people’s attention like saying: my startup was #1 on HN for over 12 hours. Mentioning press coverage—even from top tech sites—didn’t get anywhere near the reaction that our HN traction did. If you hit it big on HN, consider making this the opening line of your elevator pitch—even before you say what industry you’re in or what your product does. People will be more receptive to the rest of your pitch if you’ve already established that the collective wisdom of Silicon Valley (and beyond) has given your startup a thumbs-up.
Within two weeks of our Show HN post, we had been invited to pitch by a name partner at a top VC firm. The next month, we met for hours with a board member of an enormous software company. While networking (and luck) played a role in getting these meetings, our success on HN definitely helped open a lot of doors.
People have asked whether we strategized about the time of day/week when we posted to HN, or if we had a huge crew of upvoting friends. These might have been good ideas (and some folks have written extensively about HN timing), but we didn’t give it much thought. We wouldn’t recommend our ridiculously nonchalant approach (post on HN, go to lunch, come back and find yourself at #1), but there’s no need to go overboard on the planning here.
Startup Competitions
Startup competitions are a great place to network with VCs and other entrepreneurs, and the process of competing helps you to refine your business plan. You can also win some decent cash and grab some prestige while you’re at it. Here are some suggestions to help maximize your chances.
Judges
You want to know as much about your judges as possible, as early as possible. In some pitch contests, you’ll know in advance who your judges will be, and you can find out what startups they’ve founded or funded. This information is very useful because it tells you about how they think and what they’re interested in. Do they care about social justice, cool products or just the almighty dollar? Find out, and tweak your pitch accordingly.
If you can’t find out who the judges are before the event, show up early to the event and ask around. In all likelihood, the organizers will be happy to tell you, and then you can google the judges while you’re waiting to pitch. You shouldn’t try to modify your presentation much at this point (you should have it really well-rehearsed by this point, as described below), but you can come up with some solid answers to questions that you expect them to ask.
We had the good fortune of meeting one of the prior winners of the Stanford competition, and he shared a great deal of useful information about the types of people who serve as judges. For example, most of them are VCs, so they have the typical VC biases: it’s better to swing for the fences and miss than to hit a single or double; all good businesses need venture backing; etc. This was useful in helping us craft our pitches.
Competitors
“I don’t have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you”—joke tellers everywhere
You’re not competing in a vacuum—you’re competing against other startups. Find out as much as you can about them, and think about how you can outshine them. Research each competitor and then look at the judging criteria. How are they likely to present themselves, and how can you position your startup as even better?
At Stanford, we were competing against some really compelling startups—ones whose products promised to save lives in developing countries, for example. We knew that their heartstring-tugging message would resonate with the judges and we didn’t want to leave that angle unanswered. The problem was that our products aren’t designed to help people in developing countries in particular.
We realized, however, that we do have users all over the world—including in developing countries. So we built a slide with a map of the world, with every country where we have users colored in. It was an impressive way to show that we’re not only serving people in developing countries (like our competitors), we’re also serving people in every corner of the globe. This turned out to be a powerful slide, and it was a great way to defend against the strengths of our competitors.
Market Competitors
If you have prominent competitors, you shouldn’t pretend they don’t exist. You also shouldn’t just bash them, since you won’t come across as credible. Instead, acknowledge them, point out that their existence proves that there is consumer demand for your type of product, and then offer a couple of ways in which your product is conceptually better or is getting better traction. Then move on. Unless the judges are really pounding you on a particular competitor, you’re better off shifting the focus back to your startup.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Some people say you shouldn’t memorize your pitch because then you’ll end up sounding robotic and insufficiently passionate. I agree that memorization isn’t a great goal. The judges will see you thinking, trying to remember the next line. Unlike folks who say you should do less than memorize, I think you should do more.
Before each of the three rounds of the Stanford competition, I didn’t just memorize my pitch—I internalized it. I practiced it dozens of times and recorded it on my phone (both so I could hear where I was making mistakes, and so I could listen to my best recording right before my pitch). By the end, I could pick up at any point in the pitch without missing a beat. This level of familiarity is invaluable when the judges start bombarding you with questions and you have to be able to seamlessly pick up where you left off.
If you don’t have time to memorize your entire pitch, you should still memorize the first 10 seconds and the last 10 seconds. You don’t want to start out weak, and you definitely don’t want to be stumbling across the finish line.
Be Humble
Be humble! Your pitch should make clear that you think your startup has the potential to change lives or revolutionize markets, but you don’t want to come across as arrogant or unteachable. After all, you’re still in the startup phase, which means you have a lot left to learn about your market and your users. If you come across like a know-it-all, the judges won’t be inclined to offer much feedback, and they definitely won’t want to mentor you post-competition. On the other hand, if you make it clear that you’re open to suggestions, the judges will probably offer ideas and maybe even connections. The judges from the Stanford competition have opened their calendars and rolodexes to us, and their perspective and connections have been invaluable to us. Also, more than one of them told us that one of the reasons they voted for us was that we came across as appropriately humble and open to suggestions.
So be optimistic and even confident, but stop shy of arrogance if you can.
In that vein, I’ll say that these are just a few of our observations about startup competitions. Please make liberal use of the comments to share your own advice, ask questions, etc.!
General Startup Lessons
It’s been an amazing ride since our HN-fueled launch last year. Here are a few general lessons that we’ve learned along the way. They aren’t rocket science, but they may be useful for founders who are just starting out (like we were) or whose startups are dealing with press/exposure for the first time.
Minimum Viable Website
You don’t need a world-class website, but you do need one that won’t impair any virality you may be able to conjure up. For us, having a MVW made the difference between a blip and a hit.
We had two big splashes on Twitter. The first was thanks to AngelHack, where some people really liked our presentation and tweeted about it. We got bounced around Twitter and ended up with a couple thousand pageviews. It was awesome (10x as many as pageviews as our prior cumulative total!), but the traffic subsided quickly and there was no discernable long-term impact.
Our second hit on Twitter came from our Show HN post. The tweets that followed reverberated on Twitter for days, driving a quarter-million pageviews and netting us tens of thousands of users.
There are a number of reasons why these two events unfolded so differently, but the most important is website quality. When the first twitterstorm hit, our website sucked. I had designed it myself, and it suffered a number of defects. Its biggest weakness was that it was unconventional-looking. When you’re launching a startup, you’re trying to communicate a new idea to the people who look at your website. This does not mean that your website should itself be innovative. In most cases, you’ll be better served by having a generic-looking website. It’s like what Guy Kawasaki says about doing pitches:
Some founders have told me they don’t need PowerPoint. They think they’re being bold, dynamic, and different, but they still give a piece-of-shit presentation. At least with PowerPoint, when an entrepreneur gives a piece-of-shit presentation, it has some structure so the venture capitalist knows what shit is coming.
When it came time to post our Show HN, I found a couple web devs through the monthly HN freelance thread and worked with them to put together a new website using Bootstrap. It isn’t an amazing website (and we’re currently looking for someone to revamp it), but it didn’t hold us back the way our previous site had.
Twitter >> Facebook
Our website has a tweet button and a FB button. They are the same size, and they are right next to each other. When our Show HN got big, there were about 1,000 tweets and 10 (ten—that is not a typo!) FB posts. We weren’t expecting Twitter and FB to be exactly equal, but we never would have guessed that the difference would be two orders of magnitude. Considering that it’s easier to integrate with Twitter than FB, it may not be cost-effective to do the latter.
Press
“There’s no such thing as bad press” — anonymous
For a small startup, this adage is particularly true. Nobody knows who you are, so pretty much anything that will drive traffic to your site is a good thing. However, this doesn’t mean that you should spend much time seeking out press, or even scrambling to answer them when they contact you. In fact, you may want to slow-play a journalist contact if you think that coverage would be more effective if it came a little later on.
About a month after our Show HN, Fast Company reached out to do a story on us. At the time, our Chrome extension wasn’t up and running. We just had bookmarklets—which aren’t exactly user-friendly for a general-purpose audience. We knew that press coverage would be much more effective if it came after we had something more accessible for mainstream users. Fortunately, we were able to hold off the story until after we’d released our Chrome extension. This made a huge difference because we can push updates and notifications to these users as we develop new features and other products that we want to publicize. While it wouldn’t have been a bad thing to get press coverage a week earlier, it definitely wouldn’t have been as good.
Another note about the press: don’t assume that if someone writes a story about you that they’ll do the same when you release a new product. Many journalists who wrote about us after HN didn’t even respond to our emails when we released new products (even if we promised an exclusive). We don’t completely understand what incentives journalists are operating under (feel free to weigh in with comments if you do), but they can definitely come across as finicky/rude. So don’t take their slights personally, and instead focus on your primary job: building an awesome product!
What’s Next
Speaking of which, we’ve got some great new stuff coming out over at BeeLine Reader. We’re going to be releasing a tool for web developers who want to integrate our technology with their sites. Drop us a line (contact@BeeLineReader.com) if you want to join the private beta!
Happy Reading!
-Nick and the BeeLine Reader team
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