How to ‘Pitch’ workshop
Below is an elevator pitch ‘workshop’ I gave for the ‘Agents of change‘ entrepreneurs club of Melbourne University. The video below is the one of 6 x 10 minute videos. The first (the one below) includes an ‘example’ pitch I did for rentoid – then has ‘alot’ of questions and answers. The last of the videos, workshop 6 – all of which are here has some ideas on great pitcing practice.
It’s kind of long, but the largely due to the discussion afterwards!
Frequency vs Depth
In advertising parlance we talk about depth and frequency. Depth being how many people we reach on each occasion. Frequency being how often we reach them.
It’s great to let zillions of people know about our start up as quickly as we can. We may even be lucky enough to get some kind of viral campaign working for our startup, we may be featured in the newspaper, on techcrunch or we might even be lucky enough get a TV spot.
After the event here’s what happens: People cook dinner, pick up the kids from school, pay the bills, kick the dog and get on with life. They have a life to live and they get on with it. Our start up doesn’t really matter to them… straight away.
Consumer awareness goes something like this:
Exposure 1: “That’s a cool idea / product / concept”
Exposure 2: “Oh, yeh, I must remember to check that out”
Exposure 3: “There it is again, might be worth having a look”
Exposure 4: “hmm, Ok – I’ll look when I’m shopping next / on line next”
Exposure 5: ….They finally act, and go look at, investigate, touch, feel, try….”
After many exposures we have “a chance’ of selling to them.
Sure some people check it out first time, some buy straight away, but the large majority need reminded, over and over again. It doesn’t mean – go out and spam them or do terrible interruption marketing. It means this; “have frequent and relevant marketing communications to the people who might care”.
It’s a lot like never noticing a car advertisement until we are in the market to buy one. They’re always there, we just have selective perception.
This is why Advertising frequency is king. No point having a big launch campaign if our prospective new customers aren’t looking on that occasion. For entrepreneurs, the big launch concept is a hoax – It’s unsustainable. Like an exercise regime- it’s far better to do an hour workout everyday, than to do a 5 hour gym session on a Saturday.
The good news is we don’t need the superbowl budget of a large conglomerate to have the frequency we need. We just need to start a conversation which continues indefinitely.
12 seconds
I really like the idea of ‘small’ – Making the macro, micro. 12 secondsTV does it: www.12seconds.tv
As far as marketing insights are concerned it proves that categories don’t converge – but split.
We recently used it for rentoid to kill a few birds with one stone:
- Rewards passionate fans with a bit of fame,
- Create an important dialogue
- Generate some ‘realworld’ market research to boot.
The cool thing is that we’ll publish what people think about rentoid good and bad – so then we have to act on any mooted improvements. Check it by clicking here:
So in the spirit of involvement - I’d love to get a 12 seconds.tv spot from the startupblog crew – ‘yes that means you’ with any piece of business / entrepreneurship or life advice you feel approporiate.
Put your 12 seconds link in the comments and I’ll put it up as it’s own post with a link to your blog / startup / business or whatever.
Get on it.
Engage your customers
Really the title should say “people” – we don’t do business with customers, it’s the greatest lie of all time. People trade with people. But I just gave it that title so I could teach people this who stumbled upon this blog entry…
So here’s how we do it at rentoid.com
We have a live chat session with our people. Answer all their questions, assess their concerns and just get to know them. Tonight we are doing it at 7.30pm Aust Syd / Melbourne time.
Go here to log on: http://rentoid.com/live
You can see the startup blog author in action live and see if he (me) can deliver it all live. So tune in, tell your friends and get a shout out!
The skills that matter
Since we’ve been going through a massive growth spurt at rentoid – I’ve been thinking about the skills which matter. The skills which will take us from start up – to business. That stuff that happens after we’ve proved our concept and people are getting involved in what we do. And here’s my conculsions:
1. Project management. We must get the stuff done we’ve been talking about with our customers quickly. They haven’t got time to wait for us to get our act together. We must deliver our promises, or lose them forever.
2. Leadership. Keep the team inspired and motivated, while maintaining the culture we believe in and have already created. Just because we are starting to achieve our goals doesn’t mean we need to invent systems, create paperwork and lose trust for each other. This is where we prove there is another way to do things in business & life.
3. Maintain Momentum. Go ‘back to back’ in sporting parlance. The ability to maintain public interest and is difficult after unpaid national TV coverage. We’ve got to keep the tap running, keep communicating and getting coverage. This is where communication frequency becomes way more important than communication depth.
Another great way to keep ‘em talking about rentoid?
We make sure we deliver on all the stuff we said we’d do – refer point 1.
What about your people?
All our startups, businesses and brands have their people. It’s members, it’s customers. The humans that matter in whatever we do. So how do we connect with them? Not talk to them or worse, at them, but how do we really connect with them?
Here’s what we are doing at rentoid. We are having an coffee session in the CBD of melbourne (our home city) where members can come and grab an espresso and simply chat. If only 1 person turns up, that’s fine by us. Because that one person matters as much as the 250,000 others. In fact to them, they are the only person that matters.
The discussion will be whatever the people want it to be about. Not a contrived focus group. What matters is making a connection with them, being a group of people trying to help each other, breaking down the traditional corporate facade. Not having any gatekeepers. And quite frankly we can’t wait.
If you’re in Melbourne came and meet the rentoid team for a chat and an espresso on us before work. We can chat about startups, marketing, life and maybe even rentoid. We’ll be at Journal in Flinders lane. All the details are here.
When’s the last time you took time out to hang with your people?
Boostrapping live
When rentoid.com was launched. I believed in the concept, the dream and the process. (still do).
So in order to make the site work I had to put some stuff to put up for rent. Stuff I didn’t even own – yet. Once the site went live, it needed stuff on it. But at that stage we had no members, so we had to populate the site. Content was and is King. Included in my listed stuff was a home gym. A rental came in for it. So I went and bought it. It cost me $400 to buy. I rented it out for $140. Then Sold it on Ebay afterwards for $280. (We now have other suppliers of gyms for rental on rentoid)
Net result:
A good user experience for a new member
A $20 profit
And I felt the excitement that goes along with bootstrapping; finding creative solutions, and most importantly, inventing transactions.
Rentoid on techcrunch
We finally got ‘crunched’ – with a little spiel for rentoid on Tech Crunch.
In the first instance it’s given us a large membership boost and a very positive response. But it’s also given us our share of negative armchair experts, naysayers in the comments.
We say:
“That’s Ok – revolutionaries like us don’t care what naysayers think.”
But it’s a few thousand more people that know about rentoid.com too.
Actually we do care about what they think as it pertains to ideas to improve the service. We turn their negatives into a positive. But we always ignore an attitude which says something won’t work. It won’t for them – their attitude has already predetermined that!
In fact, some context here: We had many more positive comments and only a few negative. Also, both our membership and listings have been boosted as has our unique visiters today. But I thought I’d make this ‘blatant piece of self promotion’ worthy of a startup blog story by providing some insight!
You can check out the story here.
And add some comments here on the Crunch Base or on the story. We want to hear negative and postive sentiments. We want to improve our offer.
Reliability
4.17pm - Get email from friend advising of a small bug on rentoid.com
4.17pm - I email my main guy from my tech team to ask him to check it out
4.21pm - I receive email from my tech guy saying – bug fixed please check it!
4.23pm - I email my friend advising that it’s all fixed saying – ‘my guy is quick.’
4.25pm - Friend emails me back saying “..Wow… that’s amazing.” Blog worthy!!
As above.
Never underestimate the power strong relationships within supply chains. Strong relationships build efficient supply chains – not the other way around.
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