Teaching startups how to pitch

While everyone in the US is watching Bazillion Dollar Club and its lovable investor, Dave McClure, in Korea we’ve got our own program to help startups prep for demo day pitches.

The Premise

We have 40 startups participating in a government sponsored program called K-Global Startup Engine. The program prepares Korean founders to pitch to a group of accelerators from around the world. This year eight accelerators are participating, including Techstars, 500 Startups, The Alchemist Accelerator, Seedcamp, Startup Bootcamp, Chinaccelerator, Open Network Lab, and Hax Accelerator.

At G3 Partners, we’re fortunate enough to have been selected to provide the startups with pitch training, workshops on the basics of bootstrapped public relations.

The pitch training has been intense, with each startup presenting its two-minute elevator pitch in front of nine others, at least once-a-day. With every session, we provide more guidance on how to structure their pitches for the best results, and provide some unfiltered feedback.

The Elevator Pitch

A good elevator pitch let’s anyone sum up your startup or idea with relative accuracy in 30 seconds or so. We’ve decided on an extended elevator pitch (two minutes) and a five minute pitch as part of this program. The elevator pitch helps listeners instantly understand what problem the startup is solving, what their specific solution is, and how they’re different from others in the same market. . While you shouldn’t try to cram everything into the pitch, your main points should be thoroughly covered.

Nathan Millard going over the finer points of an ‘elevator pitch’.

For many of the 40 startups in this program, this will be their first time pitching in English. For some, it will be the very first time they’ve pitched their startup in any language.

In the initial pitch session, we provided startups with the foundations of good pitching. When asked to give an elevator pitch, many of the startups are often unprepared and curious about what parts to include and what not to.

“I find a lot of startups are often missing important aspects, such as information about the size of their potential market,” says G3 Partners CEO, Nathan Millard. A number of startups mention the total market share that is in their industry, but rarely do they provide the market share amount that is immediately accessible.

For a company like tiltcode where the advertising industry is said to be a $3.2 billion dollar market in the US alone, the challenge during their pitch is specifying what parts of that $3.2 billion they can immediately go after.

For others like Luke Korea’s Co-Founder, Samuel Lee, a simple switch from basing his script around his deck to basing his deck around his script helped change the focus from his slides to Lee himself.

While some of the startups are still in the planning and beta stages, others have forayed onto the global arena.

For KamiBot and CDO Asaph Kim, the challenge during his pitch is to explain in greater depth how his product helps children to learn code. With their product already on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, Kim and his team hope to use the opportunity to build better global connections.

Baum

The most improved pitch in the program has come from Baum. CEO, Steve Yi’s first pitch left many in the audience dumfounded about what exactly his product did. Yi’s product is a software solution that helps chipmakers to analyse power consumption of a complex semiconductor in days. In comparison, current options on the market take years to measure the same thing.

What your pitch needs