How to Pitch?

Coming out with great ideas is hard, but evangelizing and convincing others about your idea is even harder. Pitching is an art, which takes time and effort to pick up. However, learning some tips and tricks on pitching will definitely help to put you on fast-track in mastering the art.

Being a 3-times award-winner of international business plan award and a 2-times recipient of government venture grant (sounds a bit arrogant, do i?:)), I hope to share some tips on pitching with my readers.

1. Refine your idea
Great ideas originates from crude ideas. Crude ideas are normally flawed and comes with plenty of rooms for improvement. Before pitching your idea, try asking yourself a few pragmatic questions. What problem does the idea solve? Does the idea have any adverse effect? Does your idea benefit the mass market, or just a handful of people? Will the idea bring huge benefit in relative to implementation cost? If you still can't think of enough questions to refine your idea, try going to Gallery SmartShop and check on all their creative products. Ask yourself what you products you will buy and why you buy it, if you are given an RM2000 voucher.

2. Focus your area
Having an idea or solution that solves a few problem at once is superb beyond any doubt. However, an idea which covers a wide range of problems will certainly involve more pitching. Pitching is about getting others to intoxicate with your idea. Therefore, it is important to define your pitching scope. Without setting some borders to your idea, you be pitching for 10 minutes just to get to the center of your idea. This rule will help you to ensure your audience does not *yawn* at your pitch.

3. Identify your audience
It is always a part and parcel for me to identify the audience or panel of decision makers before I pitch. Doing some quick research on your audiences will increase your chances in pushing the idea through. I was once faced with a panel of 15 joint decision makers which comes from different background. I actually did a quick research on 10 of them in order to capture their attention from various perspective. The effort was actually paid off.

4. Build your pitch
Pitching is like telling a story you can't wait to share to your friends. You will finally gain the satisfaction after telling the story by having responses such as "wow', "wah", "really?". Well, at times, they might find your story to be boring too. This is what exactly you want to avoid during a pitch. A good pitch requires proper structure, which builds up from a teaser to the climax. Think about your idea, can your audience grasp your idea it in a 5 seconds, 1 minute or 5 minutes pitch? Let me give you a real-life idea which I am currently working on in 5 seconds.

"Shipping books from Amazon.com at RM5 only instead of USD10!"

Do you think you want to know more? Haha, find out how in a few more months time! (I am developing the solution now.) Restructure your pitch for 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes session. Try to get the gist out of your idea within the specified period. So , have you started working on your 5 seconds tagline now?

5. Practice it
I know a very senior executive(one of the "C"s) in Samsung Group who still practice his pitch repeatedly before facing the audience. It is normal that your confidence will build up after structuring your pitch, so as your egoisim. You might be over-confident with your idea. Believe me, things are very different when you are facing your audience especially when the phychological factor kicks in. Be it a job interview or business idea presentation, your balls tends to hide during the pitching session and you might be performing only partially as good as what you had expected. Therefore, practice and improve on your pitch for at least 15 times before the actual session. If you feel weird speaking to the mirror, try pitching to your best friend or partner, it helps.

6. Be confident while delivering your pitch
Before we dive into this step, ask yourself, are you confident with your idea? Having confidence in your idea holds the key to delivering a good pitch. Forget about pitching if you are not even confident with your idea. If you are still not convinced about your idea, go back to step 1. If you are convinced, the next step would be building your confidence. I still remember vividly how I defended my arguments in one of the venture funding approval session. I thought my chances were slim after the "cynical" approval session but I got the grant in the end. Moral of the story, be prepared and do not give up easily.

I hope to share more about pitching the my coming posts (especially on some tips during the actual pitching session). I hope you enjoy this post and do leave your personal tips/comments if you have any!

One of the greatest advice I had for Web Startup

I usually do not spend more than 10 minutes watching videos online. However, this talk on web startup is so far the greatest advice I had for Web Startup. I have attended enough seminars on startups by VCs and some organisations for me to say "cut the crap!". This video talk truely enlightents you on how easy you can create a million dollar company!

Enjoy the talk by David Heinemeier Hannson of 37 Signals, who is also the founder of Ruby on Rails which slices through most of the hype and nonsense around startup companies I have heard for years.

How to start an Internet Business?

Despite more than 10 years of experience dealing with Internet technologies, I am still new to Internet marketing. Lately, I have been researching on Internet marketing strategies which leads me some interesting findings. I would like to start my post with simple introduction tools to Internet business.

1. What makes you special?
Internet hosts millions of sites and the number is increasing day by day. What makes your business outstanding? Having a niche product/service will help you in identifying and growing your customer crowd. Surprisingly, simple business such as language translator, grammar tools, connectivity detection tools, Sarawak handicrafts, accessories and cloths are selling like hot cakes. Have you identified yours ?

2. Where is my shop?
You can host your Internet business anywhere. Ebay & Lelong.com provides member storefronts for you to start your "shop". Alternatively, you can even sell your stuff from blogs. Just post your products and services on web! If you want to have a virtual office with hotline number, you can look for various virtual office solutions in town which starts from RM80 per month. If you want something cheaper, leave me a comment and I will share more with you personally.

3. How to collect my money?
Popularised by Maybank, online banking is the fastest and safest way to get paid. Altenatively, you can open a free payment account with Paypal and fetch business from international customers as well.

4. How to promote my business ?
If you do not have spare cash to promote in Google Adwords, Facebook or online newspapers, try the following:

a. 7-11 - There are so many 7-11 shops in town, just post your ads there, you will be surprised about the results.

b. Freebies - Give out some freebies for referrals to your website. Your freebies can be the products that you are selling or simply an RM 20 Starbucks voucher!

c. Forums- Join forums with your website's signature. Be active and get to know friends there. Start with lowyat.net or malaysianbabes.net(if you are targeting ladies)

d. Signature - Design a good signature for yourself, prefebably with some nice graphics. Find good articles online and forward to your friends with your signature. Your friends will help you to forward those.....

e. Blogs - Visit friend's and stranger's blogs. Get your friend who is a frequent blogger to blog for your business.

f. Facebook - Leave comments on your facebook friends' page and start a fan club for your website.

g. Search Engine Optimisation- SEO . This is complicated but can be a good solution which is free of charge, leave me a comment and i will tell you more,:).

h. Youtube - Send your friends interesting Youtube videos related to your product with your website advertisement.

i. Information Collection- Search for info related to your product from the web and filter them.
Publish your findings related to your product on blogs and promote your product there as well.

j. RSS- Keep an RSS subscription for your potential customers to subcribe to your website promotions.

I will share more about my findings in the coming post. Stay tuned!