The cell phone buzzed. I was in a restaurant with a friend celebrating her birthday. “Hi Arjun, is your website limited only to Coursera users”, said a male voice through the speaker of my phone. “Well, no. This is just for the private beta. May I know who am I talking to?”
It was call from a dad’s friend. He was at our place and happen to be introduced to my startup idea by my parents. As a startup founder if someone’s willing to talk to you about your startup, believe you me, there is nothing more exciting.
“Uncle, just give me 5 minutes, I am on my way back. Let me explain it to you what exactly we do”, I said as I cut the call and headed back home.
Pitch Pitch Pitch! Feedback Feedback Feedback! Iterate Iterate Iterate! are the three words that have been echoing in my mind since I learnt about lean startup methodology.
To find the most effective pitch, I have resorted to the popular A/B testing method — aiming to perfect it before pitching to Paul Graham ( I am working hard to make it to the Y Combinator). The one that has received the best response so far is — “We are Goodreads + Chegg for Online Courses”. This gets more people interested, as compared to — “The MOOC companion tool for a comprehensive eLearning experience”.
There has been some good research done on how to pitch by analogy, and I think it is indeed a better and crispier way to pitch.
As I reached home, uncle and his wife were about to leave. But they agreed to spare some time.
“Your mom and dad say you want to dropout of college. Is that so?”, he asked inquisitively.
“Ah! Damn! So this is what it’s about”, I thought to myself, “Mom and dad must have told uncle about the startup because it would be the reason for my dropout.”
Of the many things I have realized while pitching to people, one is — don’t pitch to the wrong audience. You will end up wasting a lot of time explaining what people don’t want to listen and getting all the wrong feedback. Above that you may just end up debating a nonsensical thing. This is what happened with me in this case.
Uncle had visited Learnifi’s website, and had asked me a genuine question on the phone, but what followed next was completely out of context.
“Tell me what is Learnifi?”, uncle asked further.
“It’s the Goodreads for online courses”, I explained, “Most of the online courses consist only of videos and are not self sufficient. For better understanding of concepts supplementary reading material is required — which is distributed on various different websites making it difficult to discover and consume. This is the problem we solve.”
“Okay. But this kind of problem doesn’t exist in our present education system. Colleges have prescribed textbooks that you can buy from market”, he said.
“I agree. But the future of education, especially higher education lies online. And this is the reason we are solving the problem for the next generation of learners.”
“Are you ruling out the existence of physical universities?”
“Well, in a way. But I’m not ruling out universities. I believe they will become dormant as online education redefines learning.”
Notice the shift in conversation. Rather than talking about the idea — the value it provides, the conversation is heading towards a debate. It would have been great had uncle critically pointed out the flaw in our product or if the value it provides is not good enough for a customer. And the same on my side. But we went completely off-topic and wasted and hour debating about the future of universities and our education system.
My point — everyone is not the audience for your idea. Don’t pitch it to them. In order to optimize your time and get a feedback worth considering, find the right audience for your pitch.
If you found this article useful, please be kind to share it with others. Let’s help all the entrepreneurs, as this is exactly what our community is about.
And just in case you are curious, here’s the link to my startup 🙂 Any kind of feedback, specially critical would be more than appreciated.
You can reach out to me at atuli@learnifi.com or @arjun_tuli
image source: https://blog.sli.do/
Sushrut Munje
Hey Arjun, great article because you’re able to express what you feel very well. While the wrong audience exists for pitches, the debates we engage in (the ones we come across, not the ones we go hunting for) often provide us with a perspective that clashes. This is required because it brings us back to reality 🙂 It helps us assume that our target audience might not adapt to the idea very soon and thus we end up simplifying our pitch. Though you’ll be pitching to Paul Graham, your real pitch will be to your paying customers for whom nothing is obvious. Soak all the experiences in, it helps 🙂
Great job. Best wishes.
asha chaudhry
to add to sushrut’s awesome response – arjun – in our Create a Startup (CAS) sessions at our Open Houses; alok insists we first go through the WHY’s of the startup we’re creating; but more imp – we take more time to discuss the WHY NOT’s.
underline DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES forever 🙂
Arjun Tuli
Thanks Sushrut 🙂 I completely agree that we need to be pitching to our prospective paying customers, but sometimes they happen to be a certain niche. Let’s say if I happen to pitch a great wine to someone who abstains from drinking, it would be futile. In Learnifi’s case the target audience is 10 million students who have already adopted to online learning.
I love the line – “Soak all the experiences in, it helps”. True that! 🙂
Arjun Tuli
That’s great Asha! I really admire Alok, and realize the importance of different perspectives. I’ll lay more emphasize on them from now on. Thank you so much for commenting. 🙂
Natwar Maheshwari
Nicely written, I also like the art of using analogies for explaining things 🙂
You should write more often.
Arjun Tuli
Thank you so much Natwar 🙂 Your comment motivates me!
Manish Sisodia
Hey Arjun,
Well written. I tend to take your side as in why pitch to the wrong audience. I feel that the sheer futility and foregone conclusion of such a discussion might demotivate me. I would rather prefer the relevant audience, than even if we face criticism the outcome would probably be more constructive.
But than as Shushrut says whats the harm in soaking in all the experience !! His epilogue to your article as Asha said – awesome !!
Keep Writing.
Best Wishes
Sushrut Munje
Thank you 🙂
Mridula Arora
Hi Arjun,
Nice Article. When you share an idea, discussion will never be just about that, it may involve the eco-system around the product. In my view its very important to understand how its gonna impact in totality. More perspectives you know, better prepared you are!