I Pitched to Silicon Valley Execs. Here’s What Happened (pt. 1)
I had to learn from some high up people. The skills learned here helped in helped an award at the Techcrunch 2016 hackathon (5000+ attendees)! Here was my experience at an elevator pitch event in San Francisco.
Initial Exchange
Bustling Silicon Valley, I decided to pitch at an elevator pitch competition in San Francisco. Figured I’d learn how the VC’s and investors tick in the world’s capital of capitalism. On signing up, the email read:
Hi Natu,
Thank you for signing up to pitch at our event on Thursday, September 8th!
I replied and asked if we needed a pitch deck, HDMI, and he was like:
Hi Natu,
The event is not videoed, however you are free to have someone video your pitch as well as your Q&A session.
As for your question about the pitch deck, please refer to the attachment I have included in the previous email with the guidelines for the event. The pitch is a 2-minute elevator pitch that permits only you and your message, so no slide decks, visual aids or notes of any kind will be permitted.
If you have any other questions about the event, I will be happy to answer them.
Cool.
He attached a docx file to the email with eight detailed points. I sketched up a pitch loosely based around them.
My Hypetroop.com project is exceedingly small for now and I just wanted to market on one major channel. My “ask” in the sample pitch was $10k. After all, I wanted to be lean and scrappy — keep equity (blame my Canadian business like conservatism I guess).
Here is my email pitch v.1.
Hello,
My exact pitch will change, but it’s based on the following. What are your initial thoughts?
The most valuable thing to budding music artist and their suppliers are resources. Necessity is locked away from new artists because they spend their days searching for gigs and real life collabs instead of making amazing projects.
Hypetroop is the solution — a marketplace with that builds relationships and collaborations between music artists and suppliers in various genres. Hypetroop is a marketplaces for music artists and any anyone who can help an artist create projects.
Hypetroop is unique from indirect competitors because there’s no collaboration platform that puts culture first on a genre by genre basis for gigs. This makes us uncloneable.
Promotions, tutorials, and gamification will boost loyalty and retention.
This solution was cocreated with 400 users in the last month who agreed to join Hypetroop as soon as it launches.
Raised 2.5k of donations on a kickstarter campaign from our target market last year with 40 percent of users saying the would pay to use the platform.
This market is growing so fast that there aren’t any clear ways of measuring
I’m asking for the lean ask $10,000 to begin an ambitious project.
Hypetroop to needs to circumvent the cost database scaling and promoting on the largest hip hop marketing platform hiphopdx for a launch push and own hip hop. There is a 10% average clickthrough rate on mobile, of their 30 million pageviews in a month
Based on hypetroop’s financial model, this will result in 13 million in revenue if we have 55,000 active users. This gets bumped up to 20million if a freemium model was implemented.
Hypetroop is the solution software that bridges the gap between budding music artists and budding suppliers such as producers, and graphic designers providing gigs between the users.
As a highly validated lean solution to the amateur musician crisis, Hypetroop will flip the music industry on it’s head. Thanks for your time.
Ok, it’s a start, I thought.
Natu:
You need to rework this and use our 8 points.
Also, and this is key, you don’t ask Angels for a $10K LOAN. Angels are looking to invest and asking for only $10K is embarrassing. Figure out what you can do with $150K-$250K..not $10K.
Pease rewrite this, make a video of it and send it back to us.
I replied with:
Ok I’m reworking it now. It wasn’t a loan it says “lean ask” because I didn’t want to give up much equity.
He said then said:
Investors want a convertible note.
Later in the day I saw this in my inbox:
Natu:
I’m forwarding this [example pitch] because it’s a great pitch and this is the way to write your pitch.
You want to raise money using a convertible note.
I was fired up. Here was pitch v.2.
Thanks for the advice. Here’s a quick iPhone video [video]
Me
I’m Natu a serial entrepreneur, rapper, and computer science graduate with experience in building consumer facing projects with 10 years experience in web.
Product
Hypetroop is a marketplace with that builds relationships and collaborations between music artists and suppliers in various genres.
Market and Problem
Our initial target market are amateur rappers and producer interested in hip hop and edm and graphic designers. We will then move on to all genres. The Hypetroop saves them 200 hours a year searching for real life collabs through it’s seamless platform. What could you do with an extra month of time?
Traction and Potential
This solution was validated and co-created with 600 users in the 23 days who agreed to join Hypetroop as soon as it launches In this same time we raised 2.5k of donations from our target market saying they want to see the platform come to life.
Based on the high clickthrough rates and page views this will result in 190 million in revenue monthly opportunity in hip hop alone. The other genres are worth 80% more of the market meaning 1B monthly is in reach. The next move is to move on to other genres. This isn’t including B2B sales and ad revenue.
[Team undisclosed]
Revenue Model
Hypetroop makes money by taking 9 percent from each transaction and by having a pro version that’s 4.99 a month. B2B marketing will also take place for record labels.
Ask
Althrough there’s are low overhead capitol I’m asking ask $125,000 to make this reach it’s potential on the the largest hip hop marketing platforms such as hiphopdx for a launch push and own hip hop and to build a robust team to scale.
Exit
Hypetroop may be purchased by soundcloud or spotify one day to bridge the connection between fans and artists. The elearning community motivate anyone to become a musician and push Hypetroop to attract more users. It flip the music industry on it’s head by empowering young artists. Thanks for your time.
He replied by saying:
Natu:
This is about 50X better than the first script that you sent earlier today!!
I was pleased, so I replied.
I appreciate the help. I’ll send a better video if I get the chance to.
Keep in mind, all this is just the email exchange, the physical pitch is coming up in another blog post.
To download the notes I got from the silicon valley exec, get them freely from here
Over 50 Docs of Notes! (How to Market, Pitch and More in 50+documents)
Part 2 coming soon.
