5 Quick Tips to Nail Your Pitch in the Entrepreneur Competition

The Entrepreneur Competition is coming up! We are so excited to have such influential judges and inspiring companies all in one place. 

The semifinalists have been announced. These companies will be participating in live pitches in front of our judges panel. A.J. Rounds, CMO at RevRoad, put together 5 tips to help each entrepreneur wow the competition judges. 

  1. Powerful intro — Come with enough energy to knock the socks off the judges.
  2. Have your presentation ready — Make sure your presentation fits within the 4-minute time frame. Provide it to the RevRoad tech specialist by Wednesday, September 9th at 11:59 PM. Your slide deck MUST be in Google Slides format. You may make changes until the morning of the competition. 
  3. Rehearse questions — Review your answers to the questions the judges are most likely to ask. This way you will seem credible and engaging. . Keep your answers clear and succinct. 
  4. 10/20/30 Rule — Take a look at Guy Kawasaki’s presentation rules to better understand how a presentation should work and what investors want to see.
  5. Cut to the chase — Don’t waste time. Tell them about your problem, solution, traction, and team. 

Apply these 5 tips and you should do great at the entrepreneur competition! See you soon!

Learn more about the entrepreneur competition here.

Learn more about RevRoad here.
Watch A.J.’s 5 tips video here.

5 Tips to Maximize Your Time at the Entrepreneur Competition

The Entrepreneur Competition is just 12 days away! We are so excited for Utah’s community of entrepreneurs, successful public figures, and supportive community members to come together for this event. 

This annual competition is overflowing with promising opportunities. Here’s 5 tips from RevRoad’s Chief Business Development Officer, Amy Caldwell, about how to maximize your time at the entrepreneur competition. 

  1. Do your homework — Find out who the judges are. Get to know them. What industries are they in? What are their hobbies? What other companies have they been involved in?
  2. Be approachable — Smile and be friendly! Don’t be shy—you want to put your best foot forward. 
  3. Don’t monopolize their time — The judges have 36 companies to get to on the day of the competition. Use the time you are allotted wisely and respectfully. 
  4. What? Why? How? — Have your what, why, and how ready in a 60 second elevator pitch. 
  5. Thank them — The judges are spending their day with you. Essentially, they are investing their time into you on the day of the competition. Express your gratitude for their time and feedback. 

Apply these 5 tips to get the most out of the entrepreneur competition! See you soon!

Learn more about the entrepreneur competition here.

Learn more about RevRoad here.

Competing in the Entrepreneur Competition? Read RevRoad CMO, A.J. Round’s, 5 tips to WOW the judges here.

Forbes Says Hello to Hallo After a Successful Raise of $1.4 Million

Forbes says hello to Hallo after a successful raise of .4 Million

Forbes recently released an article congratulating Hallo on a successful raise of $1.4 Million. 

Article author, Fredrick Daso, wrote, “Language has proven to be both an obstacle and a conduit towards integrating oneself among a foreign nation. Dent and Beh saw the chasm between these linguistic worlds and built a bridge called Hallo to connect them. Hallo bills itself as the ‘future of language learning,’ allowing native English speakers to teach users through the startups smartphone app. Founded in April 2017, the Provo, Utah-based company has recently raised a $1.4 million seed from Kickstart as the lead investor with participation from RevRoad and Tamarak.”

Recognizing the $60 billion global language learning market that is up for grabs, Forbes highlighted the innovative ways Hallo teaches English to language learners across the globe. 

Read the full article here.

#GetHired Summit offers 1,000+ job opportunities for virtual attendees

PROVO, Utah — In direct relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment rates have risen dramatically. Current unemployment rates vary from 5.1% to 17.4% across the nation. As unemployment numbers increase, the United States economy has suffered.  One of the nation’s largest job searches in history is currently underway. 

On August 13-14 the #GetHired Summit will be holding its 2nd virtual summit. Attendance at the first Summit exceeded 5,000. Registration is free and can be completed here. There will be thousands of job opportunities from the Summit sponsor companies, including over 600 positions at  Vivint Smart Home alone. 

CEO of Mentorli, Luke Mocke, the creator of the #GetHiredSummit has said, “This is the worst US unemployment crisis in a hundred years and we’ve vowed to be a part of the solution. We’re uniting the right employers, voices, and opportunities under one roof to make sure folks can get back to work as soon as possible.” 

Diversity is a major focus for the summit. Partners like the Utah Black Chamber, Utah Women in Sales, Diversity Career Fair, and RevRoad are working together to ensure the summit is inclusive and creates an equal playing field for underrepresented talent. #GetHired Summit leadership believe that the combination of layoffs and rising remote work present an unprecedented opportunity for employers to rebuild their organization in a representative way. 

The #GetHired Summit will be held virtually. For more information visit the #GetHired Summit website https://www.gethiredsummit.com.  

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For media inquiries, interviews, or additional information, please contact Marketing Coordinator Tanner Lenon at tanner.lenon@mentorli.com.

About Mentorli

Mentorli helps diverse talent land jobs through mentors. Having a mentor and referral can make you up to 15x more likely to land a job. We’re leaning in to that power to give every qualified person access to opportunities historically reserved for the few.

Mastering Investor Pitches (pt 3)

Written by: Seth Robinson

Every story has a beginning, middle and end.  Put another way, a premise, a conflict, and a resolution. Point is, even with a compelling story you won’t go very far unless the story is easy to follow. Structure lubricates understanding. The best structure I have found for investor pitches is Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 deck.

10-20-30 deck stands for 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. The ten slides are (1) Title, (2) Problem, (3) Unique Value Proposition, (4) Underlying Magic, (5) Business Model, (6) Go-to-market Plan, (7) Competitors, (8) Team, (9) Projections & Metrics, (10) Status, Accomplishments & Timeline.  

These ten subjects give potential investors a comprehensive view of your company. They cover all the basics investors will need to know before they can consider further engagement. These slides function as the jump off point for additional engagement. The order of these slides isn’t important, and I would highly recommend changing the order to compliment your story.

Twenty minutes means you must be quick and deep. A quick and deep overview is always possible, but not usually easy. Refining your story will take practice, work and feedback from others. For practice, look into your local 1MillionCups groups. Investor pitch feedback is what those groups exist for!

Keep the presentation compelling, not exhaustive. If you do it right, investors will have follow up questions. An absence of questions means an absence of interest. In other words, the story isn’t compelling, or they had trouble following. Investor questions engage potential investors. It draws them into your story. Leave the bulk of your allotted time for their questions. The pitch will hook them; their questions will bring them on board. Do not vary from the 20 minutes! You can keep it to this time.

Thirty point font means don’t use any font less than 30. This is more important than it seems!  Thirty point font forces judicious use of slide space. It helps drive home important points, but keeps you focused on the story. With 30 point font, you can’t just read your slides, because there simply isn’t much text (don’t read slides anyway.  Bad form). Thirty point font complements a quick and deep approach because it doesn’t allow you to be exhaustive. 

Also, investors tend to be older, and they can’t see small font. An unreadable slide is a fast way to lose interest.

The 10-20-30 deck provides the structure that makes your story easy to follow. This has become an industry standard of sorts, and most investors expect this type of presentation. Use this to your advantage. Do not focus on the presentation! Use the presentation to focus on your story. Every slide should be telling the story of your traction, quick and deep, compelling and easy to follow.

Don’t focus on your idea. And don’t lose your story in your story’s structure (or slide deck). A compelling and easy to follow story maximizes investor engagement. Making a case that you are the smartest person in the room is not only problematic and difficult, but even if successful, it won’t have the effect you think it will. Stories do have that effect.

Mastering Investor Pitches (pt 2)

When assessing startups, look at the problem, look at the customer, and look at the market. The combination of those three categories will show you traction. There are many different definitions of traction. Whichever one you use, you’ll be in good shape. For today, we’ll go with: traction–your startup’s evidence of success within the market. 

So let’s talk about what traction looks like in a story: movement. 

Can you move people? Do people care about what you are doing? Do they sign up for more information? Do they gasp and smile once they “get” what you are doing? Do people want to give you money but can’t because you don’t have a product?

The more people you can move, and the more profoundly you can move those people, the more traction you have. This is the evidence investors look for in the context of problem, customer, and market. This is how investors identify opportunities.

Traction is the compelling force behind the story of your venture. In a presentation, the story is how you make traction matter. Here are some real investor stories of companies. Which do you find most compelling? 

“I am not a marketer or sales person, but with the few sales I have achieved, people come back and buy more. One in four customers returns and on average and buys 3x more the second time. Over half of our site’s new visitors come from entering the URL, not from search results or ads. How do they know our URL? People are talking, not searching. The product is sticky. I just need more places to stick it.

“I thought people would use this product because it was convenient.  They tell me they actually buy it to avoid interacting with our competitor!  It turns out our go-to-market strategy allows us to not only avoid 90% of our competitor’s overhead cost, but charge 3x the markup and get 8x more repeat customers.  Help us rescue customers from our competitors!”

“This market doesn’t resist change, it’s simply been skipped over for 30 years.  When we apply basic technology used elsewhere, and apply it to this niche, we see a 100% sales conversion rate even though our price point is 50% higher than their current costs. Without marketing we have more inquiries than we can service.  We don’t need help with sales, we need help with onboarding!”

Each example shows traction. Proof of traction builds investor confidence in the opportunity; the story builds investor confidence in the entrepreneur. Good business models are built on good information, not on good ideas. Investors invest in people, not ideas.

Mastering Investor Pitches (pt 1)

Written By: Seth Robinson

I once heard an experienced, lifelong storyteller take questions during a Q+A session. An audience member asked a technical question about story structure, conflict development, and how to make stories more engaging. The storyteller responded to the question with the following story:

“Bill shot out of bed, heart racing, even before the alarm went off. He listened carefully, but couldn’t figure out what the problem was. In fact, he couldn’t remember listening to the morning  with this intensity before, and the experience unsettled him. Everything seemed quiet. It wasn’t just the absence of sound, but this quiet was so profound that ordinary silence seemed absent as well. Bill got up. His padded slippers seemed to scrape across the ground in a new and altogether sickening fashion. The soft swish, swish of his toothbrush echoed cavernously, and by comparison, the crunch of Bill’s breakfast cereal was ear splitting. While he sat, he ate.  While he ate, he thought, uncertain of what to think about. And then, all at once, everything from that morning, and every previous morning came together at once.  In that very moment Bill realized: a story doesn’t need a point to be engaging.”

Presenting a business opportunity to potential investors has more in common with being a good storyteller, that it does about being a good presenter, making a good case, or saying the right thing. Investor presentations by design have a familiar form, but what separates the best presentation from the average ones is the story.  

Every startup has a story, and this story is what carries your opportunity to the hearts and minds of investors better than a presentation of an idea ever could. Don’t present your idea to investors, tell your story. Your story doesn’t need a point, it simply needs to be engaging.

Idea: “The more people use our platform, the more valuable it will be to everyone. If we could get 1% of the market, we would have $100M in revenue.”

Story: “Guys, I’m not totally sure what I’m doing here, but for some reason people keep giving me money and they want to give me even more. You might want to take a look at this.”

See the difference? Which was compelling? Which was engaging? Which demonstrated a conservative plan for achieving impressive returns, and which one actually mattered?

In fact, in pitches ideas don’t matter. Investors looking for an investment, not an idea. And do you know how many good ideas fail, and bad ideas succeed? The first law of analyzing startups is DON’T EVALUATE IDEAS! So, before your next investor pitch, take some time to refine your story.