We rank all the issues we face by priority and start with the first one (what could we do otherwise?). The major point here is to know when to stop and start dealing with the second issue. Let’s say your first priority is to build a prototype. You want your prototype to be impressive for your investors. It should not be too buggy either as your beta testers would get fed up with bugs quickly. Finally it should be well designed or your beta testers will focus on graphic details and won’t give you the deep feedback you are looking for (I should mention here that we don’t believe that you should test your service before it reaches this point or the feedback you will get will be polluted with detail noise). So all in all, your goal is almost to build your product entirely! And that sounds hard…

If you step back a second and think about your main goals with this prototype (convince investors and get feed back from users) you should be able to re-focus :

• Only implement the key feature you want to test : drop fancy community features (beta testers will ask for it but maybe they will suggest a better way than the one you imagined). But implement it carefully and don’t underestimate presentation wrapping.
• Leave scalability issues for now. Drop the great idea you had about hosting your service in the cloud. No matter where you host your service if nobody uses it!
• Do not optimize! Donald Knuth said it a long time ago but it is worth repeating it : « We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. ». We believe that this is true in computer sciences but for everything else also.

When I am saying « drop », I mean do not implement it. But you should of course keep it in the corner of your head (and design your service so it can be easily extendable and scalable).

If your only key feature has been well implemented and wrapped, beta testers will be happy to test your service and enthusiastic about your new coming features.
Investors will understand what you do (this is a first step!) and will take your only feature as a reference for your work : clear and efficient. They will also be thankful for sparing them the listing of all the « cool features » you implemented like color customization, home made drag & drop…

More generally, in almost all fields, learning and production work the same way. At the beginning your are really efficient : you learn a lot in a short amount of time but progressively it costs you more and more to progress a little bit (in other words, the learning/working curves often have a logarithmic shape). That is the point where you should stop. Stop when your primary goal has been reached and doing more feels not necessary or unpleasant. Of course it won’t feel unpleasant at the beginning and you will be really happy to implement this nice color picker but don’t! Step back and think, does this color picker is really mandatory to convince an investor? Or would he be more interested in a deep market analysis? (If you think the investor would be more interested in your color picker, find a business partner quickly!)

To sum it up, do as little as you can to reach your goal and only your goal. Be lazy or you die!

The coffee pitch

The day started at 9:00 am at the Microsoft Technology Center. We were welcomed by a small breakfast and got the “team” flag stuck on our chest. Tagged like that, we had no other solution than to experiment our coffee pitch.

The goal of this one is to awake your future audience (coffee is there to help you !) to get its attention during the coming elevator pitch. It is also the occasion to practice and correct your first mistakes (hoping that your target won’t pay to much attention to it due to the early hour).

The elevator pitch

On the stage, you have 5 minutes (and no extra sec) and you want that these 60-70 people to remember you during the whole day (and even longer!), and get a good opinion of you and of what you do. The challenge is even harder when they already heard about 18 other start-ups and had no break for almost two hours. You should definitely practice a lot for this one.

The lunch pitch

Now, if you got it right, people remember who you are and what you do. They have in head the single message you wanted to pass them (that you and your startup rock) during the elevator pitch, and they come to you to get deeper information. The lunch pitch is a difficult one: you have to keep talking and pitch your interlocutors, while trying to grab food everywhere to refill your batteries. If you fail eating at this time, you won’t make it until the end of the day… but it is the opportunity to have a privileged contact with the people that felt the most interested in your project.

The mentoring pitch

During the rest of the day, we had four mentoring sessions with a panel of 5-10 advisors. 40 minutes shared between two teams to pitch and ask for advice. You better get prepared also for this one, knowing who are the people you are talking to. The difficult but most interesting part comes from the questions. You have to be prepared to answer to specific questions on your business, and believe me: these people are smart and quickly point out the strength/weakness of your project. You better perfectly know these points to get as much as you can of these short discussions.

The restroom pitch

Time to fresh up… But it is likely that the very famous guy you unsuccessfully tried to talk to during the whole day is the one washing his hands next to you. You can not miss this opportunity… pitch him!

The wrap up pitch

The day is almost over, it is 9pm and your throat feels like dry paper, having pitched the whole day. You feel exhausted, and these cups of champagne seem to be the definitive answer to your throat issues. You think you have succeeded, as you have been among the five winners. But it is not over yet. The wrap up pitch is the opportunity to gather the feedbacks of your day pitches. It is also the moment when you can engage in more passionate discussions, being more relaxed and show that you might also be a pleasant and sympathetic person.

The night pitch

This one was between me and powerpoint preparing the tomorrow 8am investor committee pitch.

The investors pitch

The day after, we were asked to pitch in front of the Seedcamp Investment Committee. OK, it seems that they liked our service and the team, but the question here is “should we put money in this project?”. Of course they want to go deeper in your product, understand the problem you are trying to solve and the solution you propose, understand where you are in your development road map and what and when do you expect to launch. But they are also very interested on the value that their investment would procure: what are your expenses, your funding history, and how much do you need their money. You get here into much further details than you got before, and have to be pretty convincing as you will be highly challenged.

The Techcrunch pitch

We were then invited to pitch during the Techcrunch talk held in La Cantine during the afternoon. It was almost the same format as the elevator pitch. However we only had 3 minutes to present Wozaik. This is a “media” kind of pitch; the goal is to convince potential users. They must feel that you are building the killer app and must be eager to test your product. I think the success of this kind of pitch should be an exploding beta invite queuing list.

So how to pitch?

Even if we had extensive two days practice pitching, I am still a young beginner pitcher (and I must confess that most of the time Vincent was pitching ). However, in a discussion with Laurent Chiozzotto, we agreed that a good early stage pitch should answer the 5 following questions in that order:

• What problem do you solve?
• Who will use your service ?
• How do you solve the problem? (your product/service)
• Why are you doing this?
• And finally, who are you?

We are definitely going to follow this advice to prepare Mini-Seedcamp Berlin pitches!