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PitchCraft — Shark Tank for Product Hunt. Get advice from real investors.
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hey guys, pretty fun idea.
here's the premise:
One founder
Two investors
Once a week, for an hour
The founder can pitch their idea & explain the biggest challenges they face - and get real, bullshi*t free feedback from real angel investors or vc's.
No idea if this will work (add value to the entrepreneur and people watching, but since there's not a lot of transparency when it comes to pitches/feedback/mentorship between entrepreneurs and investors, so I'm excited to see what happens.
This will be powered by blab, which will allow anyone can tune in and watch/learn from the session.
@shaanvp Interesting idea, just signed up. And will give you guys feedback. Thanks Shaan for sharing!
@rossdcurrie @shaanvp pulling favors at first. Most investors like helping entrepreneurs, so it's not too hard of a sell.
@shaanvp Cool, great work! It's a cool concept! I've signed up, can't wait to see what gets e-mailed through!
@shaanvp Another angle is treat it more like Office Hours.. I think that would be more beneficial. Some of us don't care as much about pitching our product than making it better.
@blendahtom yes exactly. It's not "pitching for investment" (which 9 times out of 10 will be a "no"). Unlike sharktank, we can't just edit the footage to show people who get investment.
It's "pitching for advice". Whether that's advice on the pitch itself, or advice on how to overcome the biggest challenges you're facing.
@shaanvp sweet. a office hour type feel would be way more beneficial to all involved. :)
@rickyyean Ricky do you know anyone at YouNoodle? ps. hit me up next time you're in the city & want to ball. We have a great pickup game going 4 days a week
Sounds interesting - would love to watch. I getting entertaining (ie direct) investors would be the toughest part about it, but could imagine a good one being incredibly compelling.
@lhfaria The other people will be "real" - but I'm much more concerned with making sure the person will "keep it real".
Instead of over analyzing their portfolio or resume, I'll first make sure that they really want to help the entrepreneur, and will give bullsh*t free advice instead of just being polite.
I dismissed this the first time I saw it (then I saw your message on slack and checked it out again) but I have to say I cannot wait to watch mentorship in real-time and see how successful investors think.
I would say you should make it clearer that people can actually watch the conversations and not just be the founder or investor. Also from a design aesthetic point of view I am not a huge fan of the black text on green background or the padding of the main box.
@siddygups
Good feedback man. Hopefully the people watching will be able to apply some of the advice/insights to their own projects.
@shaanvp @siddygups Looking forward to finding out! If I had to guess this almost voyeuristic view into a raw conversation between founders and investors will prove invaluable.
This is cool, I can see scaling issues, we felt the pain and we had a product that was self server. I feel like we started a pitching revolution with founderfox, wait until you see what we do next with it.
@koridhandy Not really trying to scale this. It's just a once a week show for an hour. Not trying to create a marketplace for entrepreneurs and investors. Excited to see what's next with FF (link to a demo?)
@shaanvp @koridhandy yes, its a tough battle, founders get scared to pitch to VCs and keep saying "I'll pitch tomorrow" but never do. We have some other really good ideas that we are implementing in the app this month. We have also decided to build a fully dedicated website too, just finished the designs now working on the front end. I can't link any demo videos of the new stuff because its on the DL mainly because we feel its a game changer. But feel free to download the current app in the store. All the best dude.
Can't wait for this, this is what every founder needs, a chance to observe and get in to the heads of investors. You da man Shaan!
@shaanvp, very cool idea. How about segmenting it to locations, so that people could see if there's any difference in feedback from investors from the Valley or Europe etc. ?
@illaigescheit Good call. Might need some help sourcing non-silicon valley investors since I'm based here!
I'm slightly unsure about this.. many really interesting businesses don't start off doing that
"right" thing. Investors don't always have that foresight to see what the business can really become.
I'm game, have signed up :) Couple of thoughts:
1, An hour is probably fairly long, I'd split it in to 30 minutes with 2 Founders (same investors)
2, I presume you will curate them to try and find the best Founder/Investor matches (e.g Helpa talking to people investing in the Pharma industry is probably a waste of time)
@tonylucas Agreed, may split the timeslot up a bit more. And yes will try to match investors/founders based on area of expertise
This is sounds cool. Especially for individuals that haven't had a lot of exposure to the start up/ investor community.
Nice concept, very useful for all of us and easy to scale up.. Looking forward to updates
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