ihateit & The Founder Institute — Part III: First Pitch

As mentioned in the previous post, each Tuesday night, we have an opportunity to pitch to 3 CEOs. The pitch at this stage is limited to 60 seconds. That allows more founders to pitch each night, but this is not the real advantage. The main advantage of this exercise is to learn to focus. From my years of experience in a startup, I can’t stress more how important it is to be focused. The anti-pattern we can already witness at FI is founders learning how to talk as fast as possible to fit their business model into their 60 seconds pitch. This results in a completely incomprehensible pitch. Instead of solving one big problem, they solve multiple small ones, and feel the need to list them all. For each problem, there is therefore multiple small solutions, and at the end, it doesn’t fit into 60 seconds. We struggled with the same issue at ihateit, and that’s why we found that exercise extremely useful.

Our Score On Our First Pitch

FI uses a point system to rate each founder. The points go from 1 to 5, and there is no 3 to make sure that the founder does not get a score that would lead to no actions. Each point describes your business model as follow:

1 — Extremely weak, don’t waste your time on this.

2 — Weak, it needs a lot of rethinking.

4 — Good, mentor is interested in knowing more.

5 — Great, mentor wants to get involved.

On the second night, I had a chance to pitch ihateit. The pitch went like this:

Up until now, a lot of frustrating situations have made us feel powerless. That airline company losing your luggage. The pothole at the corner of your office that is not getting fixed by the council, that restaurant with great food but terrible service. Obviously, you’re not alone.

Hi I’m Nic and our company is called ihateit. We’re building a mobile app that allows those frustrated users to report their problems and pin them on a map which brings awareness to other viewers and use the collective power of the group to affect change.

Ihateit’s revenue model is a monthly subscription plan that offers access to a web app for brands who care to reach their frustrated users at the right time to support them the right way.

We collected two 4s and one 2. The feedback was great. The 2 mentors who provided a 4 loved the name and the idea. The mentor who provided a 2 hated the name, from his point of view, negative names don’t work. He strongly recommended to switch to a positive name. Some of the mentors were not completely clear on the revenue model, which means that we have to update our pitch to make it clearer. So far, we’re obviously extremely happy with ourselves. That night, our scores were the highest, and we’re so looking forward for the next pitch ;) !

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Part II: Introducing Team Grey ← P R E V I O U S

N E X T → Part IV: Getting Demolished