The following excerpt is from Entrepreneur’s book Finance Your Business. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes
You’ve heard of poetry slams, surely, where poets get onstage and belt out their creations in competitions that sometimes feel part standup comedy, part performance art. Well, slams aren’t just for poets anymore — entrepreneurs compete in pitch slams, where they try to wow the judges with the best pitches.
For Ash Kumra, winning a pitch slam yielded much more than the $30,000 in cash and professional services he received. “Contests offer instant validation,” Kumra says. “That tells an investor or a sponsor that this business isn’t going to disappear.”
In 2010, Kumra won the Irvine Entrepreneur Forum, a pitch contest held by the chamber of commerce in Irvine, California. The win helped him launch DesiYou, a digital video distributor of Indian entertainment. Since then, he’s cofounded DreamItAlive.com, an online personal growth community with more than 50,000 members and sponsors such as Microsoft and HR provider TriNet.
Pitch slams aren’t just about cash and credibility, says Kumra, who now chairs the Southern California nonprofit Tech Coast Venture Network, which runs an annual $25,000 pitch contest. Win or lose, entering a contest is a clever way to meet investors and industry bigwigs with whom you couldn’t otherwise rub elbows.
How does it work? To ensure that your pitch soars, you’ll need to research the judges ahead of time, practice incessantly and incorporate feedback from colleagues. But there are some other tips, too. Entrepreneurs who’ve won or run pitch slams offer the following suggestions.
Hook them early
“You really need to be able to convey what you do in the first 30 to 60 seconds,” says Sanjay Parekh, a serial technology entrepreneur and founder of Startup Riot, a twice-yearly competition in Atlanta that gives contestants three minutes to pitch and compete for startup cash and initial investor meetings.
Get your founding story out of the way quickly
Then share impressive sales figures, household-name customers and industry leaders you’ve secured as angels or advisors, Kumra suggests. Also, he adds, mention how your business will use the winnings — whether it’s to rent an office, increase inventory or hire an engineer.
Keep it simple
Focus your pitch on two things: identifying the problem your company solves, and how you solve it, says Los Angeles entrepreneur Vanessa Ting, who won $1,000 in a competition sponsored by Sam’s Club in 2013. Make sure to quantify your market for judges who may not be familiar with your industry, she adds — for example, by saying, “160 million people in the U.S. use smartphones.” Ditch the…