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TC Pitch

Posted by evgeny on 17 July, 2008 in Uncategorized

A few days ago I attended TechCrunch Pitch, an event organised by Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK. As Mike describes it, he felt many startups didn’t know how to pitch properly, so he organised an event where all participants were asked to deliver short and focused presentations.

There were two kinds of pitches: full pitches and short ones. Nine startups were given 5 minutes to describe their venture in detail, while ten startups, including Kappa Prime, were given 30 seconds to give a pitch. My feeling was that 30 seconds is probably too little to describe what a company is actually doing but 5 minutes are way too much. It usually takes one or two minutes to spark interest and if a startup can’t do it, it doesn’t make sense to abuse the attention of the audience. Maybe 3 minute pitches and more time for QA session is an option?

One of startups that gave full five-minute pitch was WatZatSong.com. As it’s easy to guess from the name, they help you to find the name of the song that you’ve been humming for the past half and hour but couldn’t remember the title. The best thing about this service is that you don’t have to upload a mp3 file to their server (though you can) but you can just call their number and sing a song over the phone. The founder, Raphaël Arbuz, says that even if you really can’t sing, there is a good chance the song will be recognised.

Another startup among those who pitched for full five minutes was Snagsta.com. The idea is simple and bold: to use your social network to filter the best recommendations for stuff like books, holiday destinations etc. The reasoning is that some of your friends have a better idea of what you might like than other people. Right now they’re in the private beta but I’m waiting for the launch.

Back to the TCPitch: it was a great opportunity to present Kappa Prime to the startup community in London, meet new people and learn what other startups are working on. Looking forward to the next TCPitch event, it promises to be interesting!