I miss my girlfriend @fonduecalacanis xoxox #strange
—————
Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900
http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com
Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com
TechCrunch50 has sold out. Wow…. wasn't expecting to sell out this year! please r/t #techcrunch50
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/11/techcrunch50-sells-out-see-you-all-on-monday/
Greatest mouse pad ever: Sequoia's no death spiral. :)
—————
Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900
http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com
Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com
22 Tips on How to Operate a Trade Show Booth
Friends,
Hope your summer has wrapped up amazingly.
I’ve had an amazing summer as my wife Jade and I prepare for the birth
of our first child, a girl, in December. Everyone says it’s going to
be the most amazing experience of our lives–and that I should prepare
to be sleep-deprived for a couple of months! The brief highlights of
my summer included playing in the World Series of Poker Main Event,
spending a week with my family on Montauk, practicing Tae Kwon Do in
the Catskill mountains, lounging by the pool, Mahalo hitting 10M
monthly uniques in August and, of course, reviewing hundreds of
applicants for this year’s TechCrunch50 event (Sept. 14-15th in San
Francisco).
Since we’re less than a week away from the third installation of the
TechCrunch50 conference, which I partner on with Mike Arrington of
Time 100 fame, I thought I would take a moment to discuss the best
practices for running a booth or table at a trade show or conference.
These points are general and are intended to apply to everything from
a 50-person SIG (special interest group), where you’re given a generic
folding table, to a custom-built booth at a trade show like CES, held
in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
This list is far from comprehensive, but I did query a number of event
executives with it to get their insights. If you have ideas that you
think are relevant, please hit reply and I’ll include them in a
followup email.
22 Tips on How to Operate a Trade Show Booth
——————————–
1. Define your goal
=============
In order to maximize your investment in a trade-show booth or
conference table top, you must clearly define your goals. A booth is
but one of many ways to obtain value from a conference. In fact, even
attending a conference can be a way to grow your company. It’s
important that your entire team, from marketing to product to the CEO,
agree on the goals long before committing to an event.
The most frequent reasons I’ve heard for hosting a booth are:
a) to obtain leads/clients
b) to further develop relationships with existing clients
c) branding
d) educating people about your company and products
e) to support your industry or the people throwing the event
f) for the fun and enjoyment of the team attending the event (i.e. “a junket”)
g) recruiting
h) courting investors
Since your goals are going to determine your strategy, you need to
really think about which one or two of these are the most important to
you. Most companies will look at the list above–the same list that’s
in the marketing materials that sold you on getting a booth–and say
“yeah, we want to do a little of all of that.”
If you focus equally on each of the goals above, chances are you’re
not going to succeed in any real way at any of them. Once you have a
list of goals, you really need to prioritize them. I like to force
myself to define one clear goal, like “we’re here to find an
investor,” “we’re here to get press for the latest version of our
website,” or “we’re here to find a CTO.”
As an exercise, consider forcing your team to select your top three
goals and assign a percentage of importance to each. As a follow-up
exercise, ask your team to now select, hands down, the most important
single goal. If you have too hard a time with this task, you probably
shouldn’t be hosting a booth–unless of course it’s 1999 or 2000 and
you feel like burning through venture capital money as quickly as
possible in order to take your company public.
2. Pick the right event
=============
The goals mentioned above are very specific and they target specific
categories of people: venture capitalists, clients, employees, or the
press, for example. Now that you know your goals, you need to find out
which conference to sponsor. Most professional conferences will either
provide a list of companies represented at the event or a nice shiny
pie chart with demographics.
Now you can take their word for it, or better yet, you can do your own
research. The best way to figure out what trade show to go to is to
ask the types of people you want to meet what trade shows they love.
For example, if you wanted to meet developers, ask a developer for a
list of their favorite events.You might hear about eTech (sorry to
hear it’s not returning), SXSW Interactive or Lockergnome.
If you’re looking to meet angel investors, you might hear back about
TechCrunch50 or Web 2.0. For CEOs, you’re gonna hear the Wall Street
Journal’s D Conference or TED. You get the idea; ask the people who
actually put their money down for tickets about which events they
love.
3. Develop a strategy and timeline
=============
After you’ve prioritized your goals, you’re going to need a checklist
and timeline. Your conference presence is going to have a lot of
moving parts–far too many to just remember.
For example, if you want to generate leads, then you should bring your
most sociable team members and charge them with getting business cards
into the raffle bowl. If your goal is to land actual clients at the
show, instead of just getting business cards, well then you’re going
to want to bring your most knowledgeable sales people and focus on
socializing over drinks, lunch and dinner. If you want to land
developers, you’ll probably want to bring your developers and set up
an area for them to hang out with their laptops open. (That’s what
developers like to do).
The main point is that different goals will lead to different
strategies and a varied punch list.
Signing up for a booth is easy but running one is not. Many marketing
people are quick to sign up for a booth, but slow in preparing to run
it. After you’ve defined your goals you need to develop a timeline
leading up to the event, during the event and for post-event.
4. Budget properly
=============
The cost of the booth is typically 1/3rd to 2/3rds of your total
investment in attending an event. Someone just told me that the absurd
$18,500 fee that people pay to demo on stage at the DEMO Conference is
typically 1/3rd of the total spend once you add in travel, running
your booth and preparing. $50k to launch at a conference–ouch!
NOTE: That will be the last dig at DEMO, the conference that takes
advantage of startups desperate for attention, I promise! 
.
Clearly, you need to budget for things like travel, hotels, signage,
swag, raffle items, staffing, opportunity cost and food. If you can
barely afford the cost of the booth, you shouldn’t be doing the event,
because you’re going to cut corners on things like staffing your
booth, signage and giveaways–all of which are essential.
Prepare a comprehensive budget for the event and make sure all your
stakeholders understand the true cost, so that they can measure
success post-event.
5. Run your budget against your key metrics
=============
Since you have your goals and costs defined, you might consider
assigning a cost to each goal and metric. For example, if your goals
are equally to get prospective leads for the sales team and to recruit
new sales people, and you’d also like to brand yourself a bit, you can
run your costs against those categories:
a) Land qualified leads: 40% ($4,000)
b) Recruit potential sales executives: 40% ($4,000)
c) Branding: 20% ($2,000)
As you can see, I’ve modeled this conference as a local one-day event
with a $10,000 cost: $5,000 for the booth, $1,000 for the raffle of
two iPhones, $2,000 in swag, $1,000 for marketing materials and $1,000
in staffing costs. Since you’re spending $4,000 on generating
qualified leads, you can easily back into a cost-per-lead of $10 if
you collect 400 of them or $20 if you collect 200 of them.
If you normally pay a recruiter $10,000 to find a sales person, then
you need to find a new sales person over 2-3 events to make this
worthwhile. If you land a new sales person or two at one event, you’re
way in the black.
These are the kinds of discussions you need to have before committing
to an event. Again, unless you’ve got money to burn because your
company throws off huge profits like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or News
Corp. Those companies have departments that can burn money on
conferences without giving it deep consideration because they’ve
earned that right. They have huge profits and your startup probably
doesn’t. Startups and small- to mid-sized companies need to think
about these things deeply, because this money might be better spent on
other bullets.
6. Who should work your booth
=============
As mentioned above, you want to pick the right category of person for
your goal. If you’re recruiting sales people, you’re going to want to
bring not only your HR people (who do it for a living) but also other
sales people to act as references for the HR people. If you’re looking
for developers, you need to bring your developers.
After you’ve found the right category of person to manage your
presence, you have to buy them a copy of the audiobook or print book
for “How To Win Friends and Influence People.” If you do this, please
buy it from the following URL at Audible since they sponsor my show,
“This Week in Startups”: http://www.audiblepodcast.com/twist
What they will learn in this famous book is, essentially, how to make
yourself a likable person, by smiling, showing interest in other
people and having a positive outlook. Sure it’s corny, and maybe it’s
obvious to many people, but it’s well worth the investment of $10-30
to get each of your folks both the book and the audiobook. (Make it
easy for them). In fact, insist on them listening to it and have a
book club-style discussion about it before the show.
7. Getting people into your booth
=============
Be friendly, make eye contact and smile. Ask people one of the following things:
a) “Hello, would you be interested in seeing our product?”
b) “Hello, would you be interested in seeing our product and winning an iPhone?”
c) “Hello NAMEonNAMETAG, how are you doing today?” — response –
“That’s fantastic, glad you’re having a good time. Let’s win you an
iPhone and show you want Mahalo does, shall we?”
d) Hold out a candy bowl, and say with a big smile, “Candy?” — wait
for thank you — say one of the three lines above.
If someone says “no, thank you,” say something like:
a) “OK, thanks, would you like to drop your card in to win an iPhone anyway?”
b) “No worries, perhaps another time… enjoy the rest of the show!”
c) “OK, enjoy the rest of the show. See you at the cocktail party!”
The giving of the raffle or candy taps into the reciprocity effect in
psychology, which essentially states that if you do something nice for
someone, they will feel compelled to return the favor. You give the
candy and they will see a demo. You give the chance at an iPhone and
they won’t have a problem giving you their card.
You can read more about reciprocity online, but basically it’s what
the Moonies do to you at the airport when they put a flower in your
hand and than ask for a donation. The book “The Power of Persuasion”
has a good read/listen on this subject: http://bit.ly/eLhfr
8. How to demo your product
=============
Create a very short interactive overview of your product. For example,
here is how I would demo Mahalo Answers:
Me: “Have you ever used Yahoo Answers or seen a question from there
come up in a Google results?”
Attendee: “Yes/No/Maybe.”
Me: “OK, great, well, Mahalo Answers is like that but way more
powerful. Here, you can see, I’ve asked people what their favorite
cover to a Bob Dylan song is, and you can see I’ve received over 120
answers in just three days, and many folks embedded a YouTube video or
mp3 file!”
Attendee: INSERT SOME OBSERVATION OR QUESTION HERE.
ME: “Exactly! That’s a great observation” (i.e. something to show you
listened to their response), “Let me have you try it… What question
do you have today? Think of some problem in your life you’re trying to
solve… maybe a vacation, car or product decision? Parenting or
health?”
As you can see I’ve set this up to be interactive and engage the
person and I’m showing–NOT TELLING–the core value of the product to
the user. I’m getting them right into the product and having them try
it. That is what you want to do: show the product and get the
potential user to TRY the product.
9. Do assume the Internet will be down
=============
I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a conference of note that had
totally stable Internet for the complete show, especially at tech
conferences. Have three different brands of EVDO cards as well as a
canned demonstration or screencast of your product ready to go.
10. Do offer swag
=============
Offer an easy to carry, memorable and hopefully useful piece of swag.
If you’re at Sundance and it’s freezing, give out a scarf, gloves or
wool cap–all with your logo. If you’re at a beach resort in Hawaii,
give suntan lotion with your logo on it, a sun visor or flip flops. If
you’re in New York City, give folks a bike messenger bag, a custom
printed Zagat guide or a journal with a pen.
Don’t give crummy t-shirts to people with a huge logo on it. People
may take them but they won’t wear them. If you are going to give folks
a shirt, make it a beautiful shirt with a tiny, tiny logo on it. Make
it something someone very hip would be happy to wear to the club or
golf course. No one wants your huge logo across their chest unless
you’re a loved brand like Nike, Google or Apple.
11. Do have a raffle
=============
Collect business cards by having a raffle for whatever the most
recently sold-out product in the world is. If there is a line for
something to buy at the Apple Store or Best Buy, there will be an even
longer line to get it for free at your booth. Have multiple handheld
fishbowls ready so your booth agents can hold them out as people go by
if need be.
Email those people after the event and thank them for joining the
raffle. Let them know they didn’t win the XBOX 360, but that you are
inviting them to a seminar about “how to save money with CRM” if
they’re interested. In other words, your follow-up pitch should offer
something else of value. Content is a great way to go, and the content
shouldn’t be “all about Salesforce,” but rather about what Salesforce
customers care about.
Try to go from the raffle to a conversation about a
mutually-interesting topic (i.e. a webinar) to the client. Going right
from raffle to client is too jarring and will feel like spam.
Another idea is to send a lesser piece of swag in the mail with some
content. So, something like: “Thank you for joining our raffle at
TechCrunch50. I wanted to send you a complimentary copy of ‘Silicon
Valley Bank’s Guide to Doing Your Next Valuation’ as a thank you. If
you have any follow-up questions, do let me know, and I look forward
to seeing you at next year’s event or sooner!”
12. Have a fascinating business card
=============
File this under “purple cows,” but having an interesting business card
can go a long way. I’ll never forget Charles Forman’s business card
as long as I live. It’s so innovative and cool that it got a story on
Gawker: http://bit.ly/2kuECT.
TechCrunch50 demopit company Expensify featured their innovative
business card in their piece on the event: http://bit.ly/phCR
When I launched Mahalo.com at the D Conference two years ago, I put
the names of each speaker on the back of my card in a Mahalo URL. That
let people see examples of our topic pages/search results for
themselves. Not as innovative as the two things above, but not too
shabby.
Frankly, I’m thinking about knocking off Forman’s card one of these days.
Here’s some more memorable business card examples: http://bit.ly/zqXUy
What can you accomplish with your business card?
13. Wear a professional made name tag.
=============
A custom name tag looks better than the ones the conference gives out.
Check out this one for Apple employees: http://bit.ly/2UgyW2
14. Have appropriate signage
=============
This is fairly obvious, but if you don’t have your name around and
above the crowd height, your booth may get passed by. Big photos of
good looking people are also good since that will catch the eye.
People stop to look at photos of other people.
15. Don’t hire booth babes or strippers
=============
Unless you work in the modeling, strip club or porn business, don’t
hire models, strippers or porn stars to work your booth–it’s
insulting to women. Now, that doesn’t mean the folks in your booth
can’t be attractive and well manicured. It just means, have some
taste. At last year’s conference, someone had a bunch of stripper
types in hot pants and absurdly tight t-shirts. It was totally cheap,
cheesy and lame. It’s 2009, people, really.
Some assorted smaller tips that don’t need much explanation:
16. Ask the conference producers for a discounted “introductory rate.”
17. Have a big dish of candy next to your computers.
18. Have three times the number of staff for your booth as you need at one time.
19. Have your staff circulate through the show giving out swag, candy
or party invites (if allowed).
20. Dress your staff in the company color scheme and with the
company’s logo on their front and back.
21. Consider having a game of chance (spin the wheel, blackjack, etc)
at your booth.
21. Hold a post-conference recap with your team to evaluate how you did.
22. Hold a post-conference recap with the conference producers and
tell them your pros and cons.
Questions:
1. What’s the most unique and effective thing you’ve seen at a trade show?
2. What tips did I leave off above?
all the best,
Jason
PSS – If you’re interested in this you might be interested in my previous posts:
How to Demo your Startup (part one)
http://calacanis.com/2009/09/08/how-to-demo-your-startup-part-one/
How to Demo your Startup (part two)
http://calacanis.com/2009/09/08/how-to-demo-your-startup-part-two/
How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)
http://calacanis.com/2008/03/07/how-to-save-money-running-a-startup-17-really-good-tips/
What to do if your startup is about fail (or “Don’t Stop Believing”)
http://calacanis.com/2009/02/27/what-to-do-if-your-startup-is-about-fail-or-dont-stop-believing/
PSSS – You can follow me on Twitter @jason (yes, I changed from
@jasoncalacanis to just @jason).
http://www.twitter.com/jason
PSSSS – You can follow me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/jasoncalacanis
PSSSSS – You can subscribe to This Week in Startups at the following
URLs for iTunes: http://bit.ly/BSGLu or you can watch it at
http://www.thisweekinstartups.com
———-
Sent from Jason@Calacanis.com
How To Demo your startup (part two)
From my email newsletter September 1st 2008. Reposting. You can signup for Jason’s List here: http://bit.ly/11w4BK
September 1st 2008.
Last week, I camped out at Sequoia Capital on Sand Hill Road and did rehearsals with most of the 50 companies that are presenting–in fact, launching–new products at the TechCrunch50 event next week. These 50 represent the top 5% of the companies that applied to our demo-style event. Truth be told, the top 150 companies were all qualified to be on stage–if only we could have a five day event with two tracks.
These are the best of the best, and most of them came into “first rehearsal” with a demo that I would rate a seven out of ten. (Yes, I’ve come up with a rating system for these presentations, but that’s another email).
Actor Ashton Kutcher did his rehearsal last week, and I have to say it was kind of ironic to be sitting there giving presenting advice to someone who’s been in, and created, a large number of movies and TV shows. As an actor, Ashton obviously has the ability to draw you in, but presenting a product in this format is a very, very specific skill. He picked it up quickly.
After coaching hundreds of folks over the past two years, I’ve developed 18 solid rules. You can see the first 10 rules over at TechCrunch, which reprinted the previous email with permission here. These extra eight are very detailed and speak to some deeper techniques for capturing people’s attention and transferring your enthusiasm for your product to them.
These eighteen rules are just a framework, and are based on demoing at a conference. However, the rules can apply, to various degrees, to presenting your product to investors, partners and potential employees.
11. Show Don’t Tell
——————————-
This is the most important rule of demoing right after “get into the product as soon as possible.” Once you’re inside the product demo, you’ve got folks engaged. Next, you have to *keep* them engaged. When you’re speaking about your product, are you saying things like “With Mahalo you can find spam free, well-organized search results with related content”? Or are you saying, “Here is a spam-free search result. Notice how the sections are organized and we have the top most important Fast Facts on the side.”
In many demonstrations over the past week, presenters told me what the product did instead of showing me. Other times, they told me what it did, then told me a second time as they showed me. This is really, really annoying and wasteful. Your script should never sound like this:
–> “With YouTube, you can upload videos, tag them and share them with your friends.”
–> “Here we are uploading a video, tagging it and sharing it with our friends.”
–> “We just uploaded a video, tagged it and we shared it with friends.”
If you have limited time–and that is the case 99% of the time–I suggest just showing the product doing its thing.
If you have unlimited time, perhaps it’s ok to say what you’re going to do or recap what you’ve done. However, many of the features of these products are simple (i.e. tagging, syndication, etc) and it’s wasteful to explain to folks “we can tag your video,” “we’re tagging a video,” then “we’ve tagged a video.”
It’s like kissing a cute girl and saying “I’m going to kiss you,” “I’m kissing you” and “I just kissed you.”
Just kiss the girl, and if you did a good job, you’ll know by looking in her eyes.
(Awwww… youth is wasted on the young!)
12. Use inclusive words, live in the present
——————————-
When you’re demoing your product, it’s best to use inclusive words like “we” and “our,” as opposed to “you” and “your,” and it’s best to use active words. Let’s look at two short scripts for a mock demo of YouTube, shall we?
Try saying these out loud, and imagine you’re one of the 500 people in the audience.
Script A: “You”
–> “With YouTube, you can upload a video in five different formats.”
–> “Now you can tag your video and you can put it on your blog.”
Script B: “We”
–> “With YouTube, we can upload a video in five different formats.”
–> “Now we can tag our video and we can put it on our blog.”
As you can see, the “we” one feels more like a team effort and it draws the audience in. Now, for extra points, let’s change this from what “we” could do to something more active.
Script C: “We can”
–> “With YouTube, we can upload a video in five different formats.”
–> “Now we can tag our video and we can put it on our blog.”
Script D: “We are”
–> “We’re on YouTube.com, and we’re uploading a video, as you can see–we can do this in five different formats.”
–> “Now we’re tagging the video with “bulldog” and “cute overload,” and finally we’re on Calacanis.com posting the video. Bingo! We’re done!”
Active words engage your audience. Inclusive words draw them in. Your job is to engage the audience.
13. One driver, one navigator
——————————-
The best model for presenting your product is to have one person speaking while another person is demoing the product. There are a number of reasons for this, but the metaphor of a road trip should give you an idea of why. On a road trip, it’s best for one person to take ownership of watching the road while another person screws around with the GPS or maps. As everyone knows, screwing around with the GPS while driving can have disastrous results, and a navigator who tries to drive tends to be really annoying.
Whoever is the best speaker of your pair should speak and the other one should drive. If you’re equally qualified, then flip a coin, but never, ever switch roles in the middle of the presentation. It causes a major disconnect with the audience and you run the unnecessary risk of technical issues. It’s a waste of time, and everyone will think–correctly or not–that the reason you’re doing it is because the two of you are in some ego struggle to get equal face-time.
It’s best for the audience to connect with ONE person and to get into a groove with that one person’s voice. Imagine if David Letterman stopped his monologue half way through and had another comedian take over. Get it? Got it? Good!
Navigator: Your goals are to make sure a) that whatever the speaker is saying is reflected on the screen, b) that the screen is moving crisply and cleanly and c) that if a technical error occurs, you route around it without distracting your speaker.
Speaker: Your job is to a) clearly describe what you’re doing with active, inclusive language and b) engage the audience.
14. How to handle technical issues
——————————-
If you run into a technical problem, have a couple of anecdotes ready to go. For example, if you were Kevin Rose demoing Digg and the browser crashed, you could stop and tell the story about servers getting shut down by massive traffic and the digg mirrors that are setup by users to solve this problem. Here’s a script of how to handle a technical error:
“While Jason restarts his browser, let me tell you how we help sites handle the ‘Digg effect’ of 10,000 people rushing into their site in 60 seconds.” Then, monitor the driver, who should give a silent thumbs up when you’re ready to go.
Here’s what you should not do: panic and/or start babbling. The worst thing you can do is say: “Oh, ummmm…. our browser crashed. This is a new machine, I swear this wasn’t an issue before. Oh, no, ummm…. we practiced this ten times… uhhh… I can get this to work, really…”
If the machine crashes, take a deep breath and fix the problem while your driver falls into anecdote mode. If your presentation is FUBAR (fracked up beyond repair), than apologize and let folks know you’ll be a back in a moment. Here’s a simple way to say it: “It seems we’ve experienced a little problem. Why don’t we regroup for a few minutes while you guys take a quick break?” Or :”It seems we’ve experienced a little problem. Why don’t we let the next speaker present while we regroup? Thanks for your understanding!”
15. The Setup
——————————-
The first 30 seconds of your presentation is critical. There are a couple of ways to start your presentation that will work. Which one you select should be based on what’s the most effective at engaging your audience.
–> Method One: Get personal
Many of the best products ever built were done so out of the frustration of their creators. Cisco was built by two professors who were frustrated that their two networks couldn’t connect, so they set out to build hardware to “network networks.” YouTube was created because the founders couldn’t find a way to easily upload and share their videos.
A fantastic way to start your presentation is to share how you came up with the idea. For example, let’s take the fictional example of photo sharing site. I’ve include notes under each line for what the driver would be doing in brackets.
“Last year, I went on vacation in China and took over 1,000 digital photos… like this one of me eating fried bugs!”
[Scroll through five photos of China--including a really goofy one of me eating fried bugs that's sure to get a laugh!]
“Like everyone, I wanted to share them with my friends, but emailing them was cumbersome.”
[Show Yahoo Mail screenshot, including 17 attachments]
“I couldn’t easily describe or organize the photos in an email message, and I couldn’t host them in their original size, because it crashed my email client. Plus, the recipients would probably have problems downloading them.”
[Show Yahoo Mail giving a timeout error, then switch to a GMAIL email with broken images]
“So, I created Flickr, a free, web-based photo sharing site.”
[Show Flickr Homepage]
–> Method Two: Show the problem
A second effective way to start your presentation is to show the problem first. In the example of surfing the web while on the go, Steve Jobs might say something like this:
Steve Jobs: “You know, when I’m on the run and I want to get some information on the web, I’m left with one of two choices: Open up my laptop and fire up my browser–which takes four minutes…”
[Driver: Shows photo of Steve Jobs at an airport Starbucks balancing a laptop while dragging a roller.]
“… or I can take out my phone or Blackberry, squint and try to fill out forms so I can switch my flight times… but that winds up taking more time than opening my laptop!”
[Driver: Show JetBlue website loading broken on tiny screen, forms not working.]
“That’s why the iPhone has a screen which is 225% larger than a normal phone, has a real browser that works called Safari and still fits in the palm of your hand. It’s not too big, it’s not too small–it’s just right!”
[Driver: Steve effortlessly navigates LAX to JFK flight search on iPhone while in line at Starbucks!]
“Now I just need to order my soy latte!” (huge laugh!)
[Driver: Show Steve Jobs ordering from counter while holding iPhone in his hands.]
–> Method Three: Get right into the product
This method is great for sexy products. If you’ve got something that just looks amazing, you might want to consider just starting. For example, if you’re Kevin Rose showing off one of the Digg visualization tools, you should just throw it on the screen, let folks try and figure out the hotness and then explain what they are looking at.
–> Method Four: The Showman
This is the most dangerous, and advanced, technique in presenting. I don’t recommend it unless you’ve got a killer product, you’re entertaining as hell and you can straight-up drop it.
Greg Clayman, the futurist co-founder of UPOC, shocked everyone with this amazing video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2N-uCjQu10
You’re probably not Greg Clayman, so stick to Methods One to Three for five or ten years, and if your flow is tight, then think about upgrading to number Four. Or, if you’re a risk taker, go for it… just be prepared to fall flat on your face and be ok with it.
16. Horrible ways to start your presentation:
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a) Talk about your bio and your business accomplishments. (We don’t care, we can talk about that later if your product is any good.)
b) Talk about the market size. (We don’t care, we can talk about that later if your product is any good.)
c) Give an overview of the competitive landscape. (We don’t care, we can talk about that later if your product is any good.)
17. Describe your product five times
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Folks are going to come up with moniker for your service if you don’t, so I suggest challenging yourself to come up with a 10-word description of your product, then a six-word description and finally a three- or four-word description.
The best example of slogans come from the political arena:
“Stay the course”
“The buck stops here”
“Change you can trust”
“No new taxes”
“Ross for Boss”
“It’s the economy, stupid”
“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Try and find a slogan for your company and repeat it a couple of times in your presentation:
“human powered search”
“the easiest way to share video online”
“the most powerful photo sharing service ever”
“answers, not search results”
Continuous partial attention is the mode most folks will be in during your presentation. They’re going to give you 60% of their attention while checking their Blackberry, looking around the room and thinking about their own plans to rule the universe. Knowing this, chances are they will only hear your catch phrase once or twice if you say it three times.
That’s why you say it 3-5 times.
18. Change up your style (i.e. shift your tone)
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There are many tones you can use in your talk, and it’s best to change them up. One tone, a mono-tone, is the worst. Folks hear you in that tone for more than 60 seconds and they zone out. Something else in their attention bank takes over. Here are some styles:
Excited: “This has never been done!”
Puzzled: “Has this ever been done?”
Low questioning: “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
Excited questioning: “Have you ever seen anything like this!?!”
Cavalier: “I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want Google knowing what i searched for last night!” (wink, wink!)
This is an advanced technique, and it might take years to flow naturally, but it’s worth starting now. One suggestion is to record yourself and pick out the natural transition in your talk and shift tone during them.
If you made it all the way to the bottom you’re one of the more intelligent members of the list–and probably very good looking as well. As such, please considering forwarding this email to the ten most interesting people you know saying “Jason’s a really cool cat, you should subscribe to his list.”
Have any suggestions for topics I should cover? Tweet them with @jasoncalacanis at the start, or email me at jason@calacanis.com.
See you all at the TechCrunch50.com conference in San Francisco on September 8-10th. More here: www.techcruch50.com.
How to demo your startup (part one)
From my email newsletter on August 9th 2008. You can signup for Jason’s List here: http://bit.ly/11w4BK
For the past 10 days I’ve sat through 200 company demos for the TechCrunch50 conference. These demos are mostly done over the phone for 10 minutes using the phone and web conferencing software like WebEx or Adobe’s wonderful new “Connect” service.
After doing 2,500 minutes of demos (40 hours) this year and many more last year for the conference, I’ve learned a lot about what makes for a great demo and what makes for a horrible demo. Since demoing your idea is a key to your success as an entrepreneur, I thought I would share everything I know in a few simple bullet points.
These tips are applicable to presenting in front of an investor, a partner as well as a demo style conference. Of course, every situation is different so consider these loose guidelines.
Background: The TechCrunch50 conference is taking places on September 8-10th in San Francisco and you can find more information here: www.techcrunch50.com. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch.com and I started the event last year as a place where fifty startup companies could launch their products without having to pay a fee (i.e. the incumbent conference called DEMO charges $18,500 to launch a startup company–that’s really low/abusive in my book). Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Sequoia Capital and a bunch of other fine partners have joined us in hosting the event.
1. Show your product within the first 60 seconds
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Most folks start their presentations with information like the size of the market they are tackling (tens of billions, we only need 1%!), their inflated corporate bios, the philosophical approach they’re
taking, and boring Powerpoint graphics explaining some convoluted workflow of their product.
The longer it takes for you to show your product, the worse your product is. Folks who have a kick-ass product don’t spend five or ten minutes “setting the stage” or “giving the background.” Folks with killer products CAN’T WAIT to show you their product. Their demos start with their homepage and quickly jump into the users experience. If a picture tells a thousand stories, then a product demo tells a million.
Show your product immediately, and if you don’t have a product to show don’t take the meeting.
2. The best products take less than five minutes to demo
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The greatest tech products over the past 10 years would take no more than five minutes each to demo. For example:
a) Larry and Sergey could demo Google search in less than five minutes. Here’s a box, type something in and you get a huge reward.
b) Steve Jobs could demo the iPod in less than five minutes. Plug it in, put in your CDs and it syncs your music. Turn it on and use the wheel to select what songs you want to listen to.
c) Chris DeWolfe could demo MySpace in less than five minutes. Sign up, fill out your profile, and add your friends. For bonus points add some widgets to your page.
I think you get the idea: the better the product the LESS time it takes to demo. If your product demo takes more than five minutes to demo, it probably sucks. All the tiny little features that matter to
you are of course important–God is in the details–however, when presenting your company, you don’t have to show them. Larry and Sergey wouldn’t open up the advanced search tab and the list of operators you can use in Google during a demo.
Steve Jobs does take the demo details to a fairly detailed level, but you and I are not Steve Jobs. There is only one Steve Jobs and there is only one Apple. You’re never going to build something as cool as Steve, and as such there is no need for you to talk about your product for five or ten minutes.
3. Leave people wanting more.
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If you take my advice in point two, then folks should be either blown away or intrigued by your core product. If they are not somewhere in that spectrum, you need to rebuild your core product.
When I pitched Mahalo to investors, I had five sheets of paper with different search results on each. I put them on a table and said which one is the best. Obviously I knew my result was the best, and that
simple demonstration lead to MASSIVE discussion: how was the page built? how long did it take to build? what would it cost to make that page? how often do you need to update it? how can you scale that business? how many pages can you create before it breaks even?
It’s best for folks to discover the merits of your product for themselves, and it’s up to you to make such a compelling core product that they are intrigued enough to explore it.
4. Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do.
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Weak startups and their leaders seem to immediately start talk about “what’s next,” as opposed to focusing on the core product. Anyone can say we’re going to add: a mobile version, collaborative filtering, an advertising network, visualizations, a marketplace, a browser plugin, a browser and a social network to their product. In fact, given the amount of open source and off the shelf software out there, combined with the large number of developers in the world, anyone can bolt these things on to their service in a week or three.
Who cares what you’re going to bolt on to your startup? What really matters is the core functionality of your startup.
Steve Jobs has become at once the world’s greatest salesman and product developer because he only announces Apple’s achievements. He doesn’t waste time on what Apple’s going to do: he talks about the here and now. Microsoft’s old strategy was to talk about products that were coming and that put them in the horrible position of having to backpedal when they changed their mind about a product.
5. Understand your competitive landscape–current and historical.
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This year I’ve had three companies show me group SMS messaging products, and most of them did not know what UPOC.com was (Gordon Gould’s group SMS messaging service that was five years ahead of its time). I’ve had three or four companies over the past two years of TechCrunch50 conferences pitch me on Third Voice–the controversial “web annotation” service from Web 1.0. [Side note: I loved the concept of Third Voice so much I considered starting a company like it and even bought the domain name annotated.com.]
When I pitched the idea for Weblogs, Inc. to Mark Cuban, Yossi Vardi and Jeff Bezos, I understood all the niche email marketing and newsletter companies from the early and mid-nineties cold. I researched why they worked and why they failed, and I knew which ones were sold and bought and by whom. When I pitched Mahalo to Sequoia Capital, I knew the history of human-powered search and directories from DMOZ to Yahoo Directory to LookSmart.
If you don’t know the competitive landscape, and the shoulder’s you’re standing on, folks are not going to be comfortable giving you their money, time or attention.
6. Short answers are best.
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When taking questions about your product answer questions shortly. This is a very challenging thing for many people–including myself–to do. If you’re like me, you’ve probably thought out your startup’s
issues a thousand different ways. When I sit at the poker table I play a game where I think out every possible scenario for not only my hands, but the hands of my opponents (this is fairly standard among
advanced poker players from what I understand).
Say I have Ace King and I raised out of position and the button called my raise pre-flop. Then they re-raised me on the flop, which had an Ace. What does that tell me? They could have an ace, they could have two aces and have slow played me, they could have a medium pocket pair and they want to see if I have an ace, maybe they are on a flush or straight draw or maybe they suck at poker. Who the hell knows?!?! You can go insane trying to figure all these things out–that’s why poker
becomes very addictive.
The point is all that inner thinking is chaos when you try to explain it to another person. It’s pure madness after 60 seconds of talking. The best thing to do is answer the question with the most concise answer. For example, when asked “what happens if Google enters your market?” answer quickly and with confidence:
a) Google has entered many markets, but they are only #1 in search and search advertising. They trail in social networking to MySpace and Facebook, in classifieds to Craigslist, in news to Yahoo and AOL, in email to Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo, and in instant messaging to Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo.
b) We’re not sure if Google will enter our market, but hopefully we’ll have developed our product enough that it will be a real sustainable business by that time.
c) We think Google might enter our market at some point, and if they do they and their competitors will certainly consider buying us–creating a bidding war for our entrenched position.
d) Google is a very big company right now with a very big cash machine that they have to focus on and protect–they will never do our business with our level of focus. We will out execute them on all
fronts.
These are all amazing answers (I did, after all, come up with them), and you can say them in around a minute. However, if you cram all four of these sentences together you’ve spoken for five minutes.
7. PowerPoint bullet slides are death
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Do not make slide after slide explaining your business in bullet points, because it’s really, really boring. Powerpoint/Keynote slides that are not boring include charts, product shots, feature set tables
and the like. Things that explain big concepts with ease and grace are great, but bullet points of obvious facts show that:
a) you don’t have the ability to create a compelling story with data
b) you don’t think that much of the person being presented the information
I’m not a huge fan of “funny slides” or lots of graphics for graphics sake. You’re not pitching your company to get laughs–unless you’re on stage–you’re doing it to raise capital, close a partnership or get on stage at a conference. Keep it focused and to the point.
8. How to use this new device called the phone.
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When presenting over the phone use a handset and a land-line… only!
It’s amazing to me that any person doing a business call would conduct it on their mobile phone. Mobile phones sound horrible 95% of the time, and they frequently cut out. If you are presenting your company take it seriously and get yourself to a landline. You have limited time and don’t want folks to miss a single word.
Speakerphones are horrible, and putting the person receiving the demo on speaker phone during a demo is just disrespectful. You can hear all the rustling, side conversations and horrible echos when you’re on speaker phone. When doing a demo pick up the handset and speak. If you go to a Q&A session then use speaker phone. That’s why it exists.
Only use a headset if it is very, very high-fidelity and you have the microphone right up to your mouth. Also, don’t eat, drink or breath heavy into the microphone or you run the risk of sounding like an animal. I use an amazing Plantronics headset, and I like me some Green Matcha tea, but I hit the mute key when I sip!
I know it sounds crazy to have a discussion about how to use the phone, but the majority of these young people actually think it’s acceptable to have two or three drop offs in a call–it’s not. Grow up
and get a land line.
9. How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to
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After you do your concise presentation you’re hopefully going to get a lot of questions. Here are some important tips to consider when you don’t know the answer cold:
a) take a moment to think about the question. You can even say “Hmmm… that’s a good question. Let me think about that for a second.” Folks appreciate a little consideration when someone takes a
question.
b) if you don’t have an answer be honest and say you don’t. There are many ways to say this including: “I’m not really sure, I’m going to have to think about that for a bit and get back to you,” or “I’m not sure to be honest. What do you think?”
c) feel free to think out loud and brainstorm with the person. You can do this by saying “I’ve never really considered that. Perhaps you can expand the question a little and we can explore it right now.”
d) if you’re not sure of the answer you can always say you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it. “I’m not sure how we would deal with a sudden spike in the cost of bandwidth, we would have to collect more information and answer that question down the road. It is a manageable risk factor I suppose. ”
The worst thing to do when you don’t have an answer is b.s. the person. No one has an answer for everything, except a b.s. artists. So, feel free to say you don’t know–folks find it refreshingly humble
and honest.
10. Always confirm the time of your meeting/call, and always be 15
minutes early.
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People are really busy and meetings get mixed up. Every meeting or phone call I do is confirmed twice: once by email, and once on the day before the meeting. Reconfirming meetings makes you look like a true player and it costs you nothing. You do this by sending a simple email saying “Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow at your offices at 123 Main Street at 3pm. If anything changes you can reach me on my mobile at 310-555-1212.”
Also, be early. Come on. If you’re doing a meeting with someone who might invest in your company, do a business deal with you, etc., you can show a lot of respect by being in their lobby or on hold on the conference call five to 15 minutes ahead of time. Don’t show up more than 15 minutes ahead of time or you’ll look like a stalker. If you get to your meeting 45 minutes ahead of time go to the Starbucks and buy yourself a treat for being so on top of things.
What are your best tips for giving a proper demo of your company on the phone or in person?
In your mind, what are the worst things folks have done during a presentation?
This is what I woke up to… #goodmorning
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Jason@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900
http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com
Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com
