Monday, February 1, 2010

Web Start-Ups Pitching Their Companies


In the video below, individuals were given the opportunity to pitch their company to a panel of four members and the panelist critiqued, asked questions about their product, rated them and ultimately voted to determine the winner of the competition. Each contestant was given sixty seconds to pitch their product.

The first contestant’s name was Tim and his web product was called phonefromhere.com. He started out stating that his product allows you to add phone/speech/talking to your website. This phone allows the customer to speak directly with the advertiser and the advertiser pays for the call. He did a poor job in communicating what his product is and do. The panelists had to ask several questions to get clarity on exactly what his product was. I learned from his presentation that when pitching your product, you must say with clarity, what your product is, what it does, and what’s the benefit of it. Also, the product should be unique, different or better than its competitor.

The second contestant was Paschal representing Raffle.it. Raffle.it is a marketplace for raffles. Each raffle has a fixed amount of tickets and every ticket comes with a reward voucher from a related retailer to ensure that everybody wins something. A projected price is predetermined for the item being raffled and the number of tickets sold is based on that amount sold at one pound each. The object of winning the raffle is to end up with the lowest unique number, one that only you have.

What I took from this segment was that you should research legal and regulatory requirements to avoid potential related problems down the road. One of the panelists brought out an excellent point about the raffle platform can be a good lead generation tool.  He also said that it is more powerful to show what your product does rather than just tell what it does.

Next up was Josh March with the iplatform. He projected his assessment of the future of community, which is to have the ability to keep up with all your friends and associates from one central platform, the iplatform. I learned in this session that your first idea is not always your best. Also, a good marketing strategy for widget type products is to market them to the social network site and let them make it available to their members.

The next contestants were Keld and George, representing Diary.com. Their presentation contained too much irrelevant information. That was valuable time that could have been spent communicating what the product is and why it’s great and what makes it special.

The final contestant was Alexis of erepublik.com/en. This idea is a massive online social strategy game with a virtual economy and currency. I learned that the virtual economy, the selling of virtual goods and services is a growing part of the digital marketplace.

 

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