This week, in addition to working on your venture, you are going to work on pitching! This is a particularly important skill because you will always be pitching to different audiences: To potential employees for recruitment, to potential advisors and mentors for help and support, to potential investors for funding and more.
Prepare
- Continue to run daily standups and weekly goal setting and wall-of-wins celebration sessions with your team.
- With just two weeks left in the summer, it is time to get serious about planning for the future. Revisit your summer program plan and figure out what you still need to achieve in order to hit the ground running when Fall arrives.
Learn
- Watch this Y Combinator Startup School workshop about how to pitch.
- Re-read the Masterclass on pitching impact ventures by Jason Jay to refresh your memory on how to pitch impact driven ventures.
- The focus of these two workshops are on ventures who intend to raise money. Most of what is taught is 100% applicable to not-for-profit or mission-driven ventures. For examples on how to pitch a non-profit, watch the MIT delta v 2018 Demo Day Pitch of the Okoa Project. This is a non-profit that provides motorcycle ambulance trailers for people living in rural Tanzania to get to a hospital in time.
Build
- Fill out the Disciplined Entrepreneurship Canvas to first approximation and figure out where are the gaps in your knowledge and progress. Then make a plan to fill those gaps.
- Start building your pitch deck. Consult Guy Kawasaki’s classic post on the Only 10 slides you need in a pitch. Also consult the more contemporary pitch deck template from NextView Ventures to start building your story.
- We all know these are unusual times. Check out two great blog posts by Martin Trust Center EIR Kosta Ligris (serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Stavvy, a prop tech startup) on how to navigate these crazy times.
- “Making the best of the worst of times” – Kosta Ligris
- “How to keep moving forward in ambiguous times” – Kosta Ligris
Trivia question of the week:
- Why do you think we left pitching for the third month instead of the first month?