Pitch, one of our regular events here, has us playing a version of Dave McClure’s Half Baked game. You’re assigned two random words and a partner. You have 10 minutes to prepare and 2 minutes to pitch a business based on those two words. A room full of peers immediately offer you direct feedback on your pitch. The feedback is less about the content, more about you and your delivery.

Why are we doing this? Pitching isn’t a skill that’s only required if you’re raising investment. You need to pitch when you’re trying to hire, getting coworkers to help you with a project, or getting that perdy girl to talk to you. What we’re doing in this event is getting hand’s on practice with a required business/life skill.

Pitching is also a great way to quickly find the real value points in your offering. Given unlimited time, your pitch can bloat and focus on the wrong things. A real example? We just built an initial sales site for a new roadtrip project we’re running. It’s good but does it pitch itself well? A great first step to refactoring this site? Grab a few folks who know this project and ask them to pitch it to strangers in 2 minutes. Listen closely to what they pitch, take notes like mad. Now go refactor the pitch on that site based on what you just learned.

Where am I going with this particular rant? We’re going to test out a new event here based on this. We’ll form into pairs. Your partner has 10 minutes to prepare to pitch YOUR project to the room. They have 2 minutes to pitch. Then you have 10 minutes to prepare to pitch your partners project.

You still get a chance to practice pitching. The real meat is the insight you gain by watching your partner pitch your project. Did the room love their pitch? If so why? Did they make up something that’s not in your current offering? Did they leave out mentioning something you typically focus on? Those revelations of “I never mention that” and “you didn’t even tell them about” are so valuable in refining your own pitch.

If you’re interesting in coming to our events, join us for one or we still have room in our founder’s club.