The final delivered pitch at TechAlliance’s 60-Second Pitch Competition at Voices.com. My good friend Zamir won with a fantastic pitch of his joy-creating product VidHug.
Here is a link to the podcast:
My pitch wasn’t my best. It wasn’t my worst. And, I learned a lot in the process of putting the pitch together, delivering in those 60 seconds, and reflecting on it after.
Here are a few of the things I’ve thought after watching back and getting feedback from others:
- While my practice attempts were relaxed and appropriately paced, I sped through in the final pitch. In fact, I still had 9 seconds left where I could have used pauses for more impact.
- I was a bit stiff and robotic. I had restructured and added some parts in that day after getting some feedback. I felt like I worked harder on getting the words correct then delivering an authentic pitch. That tension also caused me to fumble at both the beginning and end.
- I did not keep a through-line. I started out by talking about how we struggle with difficulty remembering important conversations and ended on how we are helping people communicate better
- Overall, there was a lack of focus. We’ve been talking to and working with marketers, researchers, sales teams, and everyday people in their professional careers, but because I tried to be inclusive to all those markets in the pitch it didn’t connect deeply with any of them.
What did you think of the pitch? I’m always open to feedback and trying to improve every day. With more refinement, I know we will be able to articulate the beauty of what we are building. Thank you, everyone, for the support.
I didn’t hit everything I wanted to do in the pitch, but here is the transcription of a complete version I got down really well in an earlier practice:
60-Second Pitch Transcript
By the time I’m done saying this, I am lucky if you remember about 50% of what I said. As a former hockey player, I am happy, if I remember anything.
But, even if I printed you a transcript of what I’m saying today, that wouldn’t be enough. Because communication is more than just words.
That’s why we built Speak. On the front-end, Speak is a simple app where you can easily create and import audio, video and text. On the back-end, Speak uses artificial intelligence to transcribe and extract valuable insights like keywords, topics, brands, and even tones.
By identifying the most crucial and impactful parts of our users analyzed data, Speak enables researchers to save time and money on their groundbreaking work, marketers to create more consistent and engaging content, sales teams to close more deals, and everyday people to communicate better in their personal and professional lives.