What We Learned from Making the Podium at a Start Up Contest
We recently presented at the Mobile Monetization Summit 2014, ultimately placing in 3rd after two very talented teams, of which you can read about here. During the summit we got the chance to showcase our products at the conference floor, and to discuss the concept with industry leaders.
This being the first time we present to an industry crowd, as opposed to meeting with partners, publishers, or investors 1–1, it was a chance to gauge at reactions and get a feel for what trends seem to capture attention and captivate professionals. Here’s some of what we learned.
These are three less obvious things we picked up, experiencing the event in first person. So we thought we’d share:
1. Speak Natively
2. Memorize your pitch. To the word.
3. Standing on stage is a win on it’s own.
Speak natively — New ideas often need to be framed in familiar terms. Our product reads “Gesture Monetization”, and while we might understand it, along with our partners and investors, it’s still a new concept, that will fall on deaf ears if not framed correctly. We often had to resort to live demos, which was fun at 1–1 settings. Our demos aspire to be intuitive, at least we think they do. But trying to explain this to a crowd, even one that knows ad tech and is familiar with the lingo, it’s often better to reference and compare. We often use the phrase — “native advertising on steroids”, “using touch screen actions create added engagement”, “attaching ad units to native browser UX “ or other little smarty pants expressions. They bring the audience closer and act as baby steps in educating the market on something new.
Memorize your messaging — if you know us, you probably know we leave nothing to chance. Getting on stage with anything less than the entire 5 min pitch memorized by heart, word for word, sentence for sentence, is the minimum you can do. We practiced and honed our message over and over again during the course of two weeks. We paused our development schedule for 5 days to work on the demo alone, and we made sure our demo tools were fail safe. The result is not only a better pitch, but raised the standards at which we’re willing to present to investors again. There’s not much worse that going on stage and having your demo fail or your slide deck get lost (yes, that happened to one contender).
Coming in 3rd is as good as presenting. Sorry, it had to be said. If you’ve made the finals of a startup contest and got the chance to present, you should feel like us — in the right direction. The 6 companies presenting all had fantastic ideas, and winning teams. Being amongst them makes us push even harder. We’re not looking to win anything other than value for our company. And we have. Give us some love, check us out at www.errnio.com
