Want to attract investors for your great business idea? Well, in that case, Elevator Pitch might be your guardian angel. An elevator pitch is a crisp gist of what your idea for selling a product or a company looks like.
What Is An Elevator Pitch?
The idea behind the elevator pitch is to make it as short as an elevator ride. It is a short and quick summary of what the thing is, the product’s need in the market, and how it is to be developed. The ultimate goal is to attract an investor by explaining your whole model most creatively and directly in approximately one minute.
It is convenient for both the creator and the investor to get on with the whole meeting without the hassle of preparation and presentations. It also makes it easier for the investors to understand the ideas in a more simplified way, and if interested, the meeting can always be taken to a proper discussion stage eventually.
Make sure you’re able to grab attention with the first two sentences, can put forward all the important factors, and most importantly, can share the role of the investor in the whole process.
Elevator pitches are also used to introduce and present yourself for job opportunities. It is a great way of building a remarkable first impression in a short amount of time.
How Do You Write an Elevator Pitch?
Now that we understand what an elevator pitch is, let’s hop on to how to make that first impactful impression for your billion-dollar idea.
The shortest way of presenting the idea you have been working on for a month seems impossible, but let’s make it possible with these few yet very important things to keep in mind:
- One-pager templates over long-running presentations, any day.
- Keep it short and sweet, but make sure you cover all of the highlights of your unique idea in the first 30 seconds. It should cover everything related to the main product, selling features, the need, and how it stands out in the market.
- Your goal is not to say everything in that short period of time, but to hold the investor’s attention tightly. This can be accomplished by keeping things as simple as possible and avoiding technical terms.
- Always start with an intriguing question to push investors out of their comfort zone and make them think! This will make them more focused and curious to find an answer by the end of your pitch.
- Build the trust of your investor by adding an emotional angle to the pitch. Start with a mention of your company’s prior achievements, if any, to dismiss the thought of failure, and then swoop in with an emotionally charged statement. Be enthusiastic and make the investors believe that your product is the need of the hour.
- Another very interesting thing to do while curating a pitch is to focus on your client. Instead of working on the old traditional ways of marketing the product, add a little twist. Instead of going on and on about how the general population needs the product, tell the investor how he needs the product to resolve his issues and why this is the most convenient deal for him.
- A pitch is an open-ended conversation in itself! Important is how to end the pitch most effectively! Make sure to leave the investor almost satisfied and with a certain plan for taking the discussion further in a more conducive space.
- Apart from your content, what matters is how you sell it, right? So keep it natural! Make sure you’re dressed for the occasion and you look sharp. Be confident, and don’t rush through it. Ease out, take pauses, and maintain eye contact.
10 Sample Pitch Deck Examples:
Pitches are a fundraising and marketing tool for your business, and in fact, they are the most important stage of developing your idea into a proper business.
Listed down below are 10 examples of famous companies and their start-up pitch decks for your better understanding. These pitch decks were created by these tech giants when they were just small startups.
1) Facebook
Facebook is a social media platform that helps people connect with family and friends online. This networking marvel was Mark Zuckerberg’s personal dorm room project until 2004 when an outsider investor named Peter Thiel invested a hefty $500,000.
Facebook was initially limited to students, staff, faculty, and alumni at Harvard University. Later, it expanded to other schools, then to North America, and then eventually took over the whole world with more than 2.98 billion monthly users.
The original pitch deck describes Facebook as an expanding online directory that connects students, alumni, faculty, and staff through social networks at colleges and universities. This online directory allows for user connections based on friendship, courses, and social networks (including intra- and inter-school networks) and has a built-in messaging system.
The pitch contained the company’s value proposition and key metrics, and the focus was based on a solid number of their engagement and growth history.
2) YouTube
Youtube was co-founded by a group of friends, Chan Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, as a solution to video sharing online. The company was first funded by Sequoia Capital with $11.5 million and Artis Capital with $8 million. Youtube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006 and experienced massive growth after issuing the slogan “Broadcast Yourself.”
Youtube had a traditional pitch deck and described its primary goal as becoming the primary outlet of user-generated video content on the internet and allowing anyone to upload, share, and browse this content.
The pitch deck was created years ago and lacked visuals and designs. Regardless, YouTube has emerged as the biggest name in the tech industry, with 122 million daily users.Â
3) Airbnb
Airbnb entered the picture as a cost-effective alternative to expensive hotels for tourists who were stuck with expensive hotels online. It modernised the concept of CouchSurfing, and the pitch deck is known to be one of the best ones out there.
Airbnb benefits both tourists and local communities by providing a platform that connects travellers with locals, allowing them to rent our rooms or even entire homes. Travellers can save money, locals can monetize their empty rooms, and they can share culture and connect with locals—they just take a 10% commission.
This hospitality tech startup company has raised the bar with their creative pitch deck. The pitch is crisp and communicates the goals extremely well, with reliable predictions and great strengths.
4) WeWork
WeWork is a ground-breaking American real estate company that has transformed the traditional office and introduced the world to the concept of flexible workspaces. It was founded by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey back in 2010 after frustratingly failing to find shared office spaces.
WeWork’s pitch deck describes itself as the creator of working and living spaces that are responsive to the productivity needs and stylistic preferences of today’s mobile, creative workforce. We are the only organized, global, well-capitalized providers of space as a service model.
WeWork’s pitch deck was a huge hit all over the world in providing flexible coworking spaces near you, with a total valuation of $47 billion.
5) Snapchat
Snapchat is an instant messaging platform curated in 2011 with the unique idea of sharing photos and videos as messages that disappear and become inaccessible after a few seconds.
The app was initially launched as “Picaboo” on iOS by Reggie Brown, Evan Spiegel, and Bobby Murphy, and later revamped as Snapchat. Today, Snapchat has 347 million daily active users.
The company’s vision was to not make Snapchat a traditional Kodak moment-capturing application. They wanted the app to represent communication with a range of human emotions.
The company has a fun pitch deck from 2014, which is not exactly their pitch deck but a presentation to introduce the Snapchat business and its features with an overall review of the app. The slides are stuffed with text, and the pitch could have benefited from pictures.
6) LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an employment services platform that uses social networking as its main means of career development. It was first founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman. The company’s Series B pitch deck focuses on the importance of networking as the company’s core value.
LinkedIn’s founders described LinkedIn in their pitch deck as more than just a recruiting business. It is a platform for finding the people you need. The deck highlights how LinkedIn is “Networking for Businesses”.
The pitch deck focuses primarily on the company’s past success and growth, as well as how the 2.0 version will be an improved version of it. It consisted of massive facts and data research and aimed at a more realistic goal than making it artistic.
7) Buzzfeed
Buzzfeed is an American online media, news, and entertainment company that was first founded in 2006. It was co-founded by Jonah Peretti, John S. Johnson, and Kenneth Lere, who later became executive chairman of the company.
Jonah and John initially wanted to focus on tracking viral content. The site originally hosted online quizzes and had pop culture articles, but later grew into a global media outlet with coverage on a variety of topics like politics, entertainment, sports, businesses, animals, etc.
In their pitch deck, Buzzfeed focused on the idea of advertising as content instead of separating these two entities and believed in running content generated by users, algorithms, and advertisers. Buzzfeed wished to increase traffic without hiring editors and to establish itself as a self-serving advertising platform.
This sweet and sour social media platform has been able to raise a total of $496.3 million after its pitch deck and has been valued between $1 and $10 billion in the last 14 years.
8) Moz
Moz is an American-based search engine optimization (SEO) company that helps people run SEO campaigns. SEO is a great digital marketing strategy that helps your business earn valuable traffic.
Moz had a fun pitch deck and presented their goals and statistics throughout, sharing their importance and need in the lives of not just the businesses out there but also the investors. It described itself with a tagline that says, “How a tiny Mom & Son consultancy became a leader in SEO software, and our roadmap is to be Seattle’s next $1 billion company.”
This Series B deck for Moz was promising, had great ambition, and raised over $18 million.
9) Spotify
Spotify is a premium audio streaming service provider that gives you on-demand access to millions of songs and lyric categories. This Swedish company was first cofounded by Daniel EK and Martin Lorentzon as a way of bringing music to everyone, everywhere, and was revolutionary in the music industry.
Their pitch deck was created in 2006 as a means of recruiting people and pitching talents at local universities in Sweden. Spotify’s pitch deck described itself as a distributed system for online audio streaming and raised $100 million.
Spotify is one of the largest streaming giants globally, with over 456 million monthly active users and 195 million paid subscribers.
10) Uber
Uber is a San Francisco-based transportation and mobility service provider that was founded in 2009 as Ubercab by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick. Uber evolved as a solution to reduce the cost of direct transportation and was seen as a change to the way taxi systems work.
Ubercab’s pitch deck described itself as a “next-generation efficient car service.” This “NetJets of car services” had a crisp bullet-point pitch deck. It was short, contained factual statements, relied on how the idea was a game changer and didn’t need long explanations.
The Click Car Services site was a members-only service that was customer-focused and computer coordinated. The original pitch generated $1.25 million and has turned into an $84.2 billion company today.
Pitch Deck vs. Elevator Pitch
The few basic differences between a pitch deck and an elevator desk are:
1) A pitch deck is an elaborate presentation that summarises a business plan, while an elevator pitch is a quick description of the business idea. The former is the whole movie, while the latter is just a trailer.
2) A pitch deck consists of around 8–10 slides of extensive research on the prospective business, whereas the time duration for an elevator pitch is as short as an elevator ride of 30 seconds.
3) Elevator pitches are to ignite the interest of the investors, whereas pitch decks are to provide them with more knowledge of what the business is and everything around it.
4) If you’re able to grab the attention of potential funders in the first round of an elevator pitch, it will then lead to a pitch deck where people can sit down and go through the process of understanding what one is going to fund.
FAQs on 2-Minute Startup Pitch Ideas
What do you say in an elevator pitch?
An elevator pitch is a short overview of an idea or a business that you want to pitch to interested investors. It’s a quick summary of what you’re trying to sell. Elevator pitches are as short as an elevator ride, so be quick! Focus on what the product is, what it does, its need in the market, and the process of development, monetization strategy, etc.
How do you write an elevator pitch?
Make sure it’s short and hits on all the important selling points of the product. Grab attention in the first 30 seconds of the pitch. Start with a question so that the investors are curious enough to find an answer by the end of the pitch.
Instead of focusing on how useful the product is for people, focus on how useful it will be for the investor. Add a little emotional statement to charge up the pitch. Avoid getting into statistics to back your data, which will make it boring. And last but not least, finish by sharing your contact details for taking the discussion further.
What are the four parts of an elevator pitch?
Make sure it’s super short and covers everything important to impress an investor.
1) Start with the name and description of the product.
2) Then move on to what the product does and all its main features.
3) Then focus on how the product will be created and, thereafter, the product’s utility for the people.
4) End your pitch by sharing your contact information and information for further discussion about the pitch.
What are the three elements of an elevator pitch?
The main three elements one needs to focus on in an elevator pitch are:
1) Make it super short and cover what is important to attract investors. Avoid sharing too much information that will tick the client off.
2) Write a simple pitch that’s easy to understand. The usage of technical words and intimidating language should be avoided. This will confuse the clients and make them lose interest.
3) It should be short but creative. You must use creativity and make the pitch interesting. This will keep the investors intrigued, and you will be able to hold onto their attention for a longer period.
How do you pitch in 30 seconds?
An “elevator pitch” is the shortest and quickest description of you or your unique idea in your authentic voice. Because you don’t have much time, make sure to grab attention in the first 30 seconds by discussing your main idea and the selling points. Start with a question to make the investors more curious to find an answer to it by the end of your pitch. And remember, be confident!
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