Creative Founder: First Pitch

We were a week away from the final pitch day and me and my team were really exited to present to Kate Rutter. She had a lot to say about our idea the first time she came to class. My team and I listened to her feedback, divided and planned on how to conquer. We decided to do things a bit different this time. We entirely based our presentation on Airbnb’s pitch deck. It was not the way we usually do things, but hey, we are here to take risks. We went for it!

I noticed that my team was not very convinced about the presentation, but we decided to get out of our comfort zones. We practiced over and over again and when the time came, we were there presenting to her. I started noticing the faces of confusion around the room and then Kate Rutter’s “take a deep breath first” comment happened again. She nailed us to the wall once again. She did not understand our product, our costs did not match, nothing made sense and we were a week away from our final pitch. We had just pivot a week ago and we thought we had everything figured out. She proved us wrong. Once again.

But what happened? We were all startled. We couldn’t believe what just happened. We had spent the whole weekend making sure we covered every single detail and come up with the best solution after talking to more designers and experts. Our guts told us we were right, but what happened? What happened is that we did not have a solid value proposition and our story did not make sense. We took the risk of telling our story through someone else’s pitch deck and we did not manage to communicate our ideas properly. We took a risk and we failed.

It was time for us to move fast and make things happen. I called for a team meeting and put the cards on the table. We had a great idea, we were passionate about it, we had validated it and our gut was telling us to stick to it. The nature of being an entrepreneur is embracing failure and uncertainty. We are a group interaction design students taking an entrepreneurship class in Silicon Valley and I knew that these were the most valuable moments and learnings we were going to get from the class. Learning from our mistakes, getting rid of what doesn’t work, putting ourselves together and moving on.

For our next pitch, we need to have a solid value proposition, get rid of all of the ideas that were distracting us and focus on our MVP. Sure we could talk about all the new findings we got, why we decided to pivot, but we do not have time to validate this. We will stick to what we know, telling a great story, listen to the feedback we got and practice.