Last week, Rosa and I made our way to East London for one of the excellent events hosted by 3beards. Don't Pitch Me Bro is an opportunity for start-ups to present and discuss their product in an interested and supported environment; we get really excited when it comes to innovative new entrepreneurial projects in whatever field, so the promise of discussing some interesting projects really appealed to us.
After some huge burritos and a couple of beers at The Bakery, the presentations got going. All four ideas were given not as a sales pitch, but more as a demo opportunity to get some useful feedback for the next stage of development. In addition to the advice given to the various presenters, the event was also the perfect way for Rosa and I to gain insight into the inner workings of other dedicated start-ups.
Concepts ranged from a self-storage company based on a cloud-storage structure, to a spam-preventing email blocker service - but although the ideas were different, certain points recurred throughout the presentations. UX was concentrated upon heavily - particularly for the mobile device-based apps. With regards to usability, the originality of idea was also discussed heavily, as was the basic usefulness and practicality of the propositions. But perhaps most obviously, money ended up being the most essential point of discussion as the most critical aspect of any start-up business plan. Whilst some of the ideas were extremely appealing to the crowd, the question of how to make a profit from the concept not only proved to be a difficult question to answer, but also the most difficult aspect to agree on. The developers themselves seemed to have a slightly warped outlook of consumer cost in that their product was either hugely under - or over - priced. In that respect, the audience to which the developers were pitching to proved to be incredibly useful in a very simple way.
Aside from the ideas themselves, the different approaches to presentation intrigued Rosa and I. Whilst the environment was hugely supportive, the intimidating task of essentially condensing a huge, personal project into a few short minutes was impressively undertaken by most of the presenters. Confidence levels had to be high, and on top of this, expressing a genuine belief in the project certainly came across more from some developers than others. We took a few very important notes and ideas about how best to present our own ideas and concepts in the future - deciding upon a simple, visually supported, confident approach.
Perhaps you'll be able to give D I S C O U R S E some professional feedback in the future at an event like Don't Pitch Me Bro - but for now, we'll continue embracing all the East London start-up scene has to offer whilst we're both in the capitol for the summer.
