I love the concept of the elevator pitch.

First of all, it is a mental exercise for you as a founder.

What is an elevator pitch?

It is a short description of an idea, product, or company. It was meant to be short as an elevator ride. Meaning 30 seconds or less.

This concept also applies to pitching yourself as an individual. But we will be focusing on the startup version of this.

An elevator pitch should be enough to explain your startup idea and leave that person curious for more. This must not be confused with the concept of a pitch deck…

A pitch deck is a 10 to 15-slide presentation to introduce a business proposal which you read about it here …

How to write an on-target elevator pitch?

I will give you some tactics to approach writing your elevator pitch and some lessons learned during my experiences…

So let’s break down what an elevator pitch should look like. Again there is no “one” formula that creates the best elevator pitch but I will give you the most working one.

First of all, starting with a question…

So you have the advantage of tackling a problem as an entrepreneur.

The question also allows you to turn this into a controlled conversation rather than just a one-way pitch. Key point is to get the listener’s attention in the first 10 seconds.

The focus here is to be relatable. You have to speak about a problem that the potential customer or a potential investor will probably have experienced.

Other than questions you will also tackle challenges.

For example, you won’t be able to show your digital product in an elevator. To solve that problem. You have to focus on the problem-solution combination.

This is what an elevator pitch is mainly. A teaser of your startup that is enough to get people interested…

No Jargon!

Too many technical terms put together sounds like jargon. Your first job is to gain interest. If the listener is interested then you are allowed to use the terms.

And finally a hint of traction.

You may or may not want to give details about your company but a metric that gives a sense of growth in your business is pretty useful for credibility.

Now, let’s move on to some examples, you will understand them better…

What I am going to do is to imagine the elevator pitches of some popular startups… We will use the information on their pitch deck and don’t forget it’s the year 2008 Uber was UberCab back then…

Don’t you want to book a car faster whenever you need one? Today radio dispatch is an inefficient way to give the proper services to the customers.

Taxi monopoly is reducing the quality of service, the license is very expensive because of this, drivers are underpaid…

We “Uber” created a fast and efficient on-demand car service with the latest consumer web and device technology. Let users automate dispatch to reduce waiting time.

Cab users save time and drivers can earn more because the process is optimized…

So how is that sound?

Notice how I started mentioning both taxi users and drivers at the same pitch… Uber doesn’t specifically target the taxi users, also drivers are their target…

Now let’s do the Intercom.

How many times have you tried to reach someone to get information when you are on a webpage? It is very hard for Saas companies to build a meaningful relationship with customers…

It requires customer discovery, research, communication, and relationship management…

Even email fails to manage this process because of terrible engagement and building a targeted email list is a long and hard process…

We build a solution to this problem… It’s easy to install like Google Analytics and lets Saas manage their customers in an App Messaging…

So far we have raised 600k Convertible Note and we are creating a product for a Saas market worth 21$ Billion…

Ok, did you notice how we try to tell the pain point first? We may break one rule in this elevator pitch… Such as not using technical terms but still it depends on who you are pitching… And rules are for breaking 🙂

Also one other thing we did here… It’s we stated that we have already raised investment on Convertible Note… For those who don’t know what Convertible Note is, don’t worry we will have a whole section on it…

Lastly, we mentioned how big the market are we in. This would draw the attention of potential investors right away…

As I said previously there is no one way to create an elevator pitch and if you have suggestions feel free to share them with our community…