Pitch your hackathon product in 3 minutes and conquer the jury
I was part of the jury at this year’s Tech Crunch Disrupt Hackathon in Berlin where we had to choose a winner among 45 teams, pitching their products for just one minute. That means 60 seconds of no waisting time.
Most frequent mistakes
1- Not showing the product. If you have built something overnight please show it to me. It makes no sense for me if you explain me the problem for the whole minute if I don’t get to see what you have built for that.
2 - Not enough practising. If you are not good at public speaking and do not like presenting please choose the best person in the team for it and make this person repeat and repeat again. Make sure your pitch fits in the given time.
3- No sorry. People waste many time saying “I’m sorry”, “I forgot this and that”, “well, sorry this is not what we wanted to show”. Run the show smoothly and say less sorries. They just make you waste time and bore the audience.
How to nail it? Here are some tips.
1- Divide your presentation in clear thoughts. Use for each though one sentence. That will help you avoid time and you will be able to communicate the idea clearly.
2- Learn it by heart. If you only have one minute and you need to make the most of it, just learn your script by heart. Yes, you can make it.
3- Show me the product. If there is no time for a live demo just show me some screens and guide me though the user journey. I want to see how it works what you have built.
4- Customers. I’m sure you manage to add one sentence about who will pay for that.
5- Do not forget to mention which of the given SDK or APIs for the hackathon you have integrated in your product and what for.
6 -Finish by telling in one sentence what’s next. Is this going to be the next big shit by 2020? How many paying do customer do you want to achieve by next year? This is a very difficult one but hey! you can fake it :) It helps to give us n idea of which are your motivations, expectations and goals.
Upcoming hackathons
Feel invited to join our hackathons at next media accelerator and put this pitching tips into practice the next time!
Innovation. Creativity. Fun.
The most important here is to remember that hackathons are supposed to be competitive and have the chance to win prizes but make sure yout put above all that the fun part: meet cool people and have a great time.
