The venture battle was several weekends ago and I had the opportunity to watch Luke Mantzells team put together a pitch. This opportunity is something that I am very grateful to have been able to see and something that I would love to partake in in the future. Seeing someone like him participate in the venture battle was a great example to me and other entrepreneurs alike. Some of my main takeaways are…
Confidence is key: Being confident in your product goes such a long way. Even the tone of voice that he and his team used was so much stronger than the other two teams that I saw. Having confidence in your product does so much of the selling for you. When other groups went it felt like they were trying to sell themselves on the product as well, but Luke’s team was grounded in knowing their product well and taking questions head on.
You don’t have to be the first person who has ever done it: Luke’s whole product was built on the back of another product. Not all of the concepts were original and that’s ok. I think that entrepreneurship is scary sometimes because we feel like we have to be the first person on earth to come up with an idea and that if another person has tried it to scrap our thoughts. This is not the case at all. Entrepreneurship is about thinking differently than the commons and that may look like modifying a product just enough that you open it up to a new demographic.
Lastly be honest: This one sounds like a given but through sales class and through watching the venture battle it has become more apparent that being honest is so much more attractive in a business sense than trying to pull something out of a hat to satisfy a customer. The groups that were given questions and had to try to justify themselves back into being an option for the investors looked so much less appealing. When given a question that is tough to answer or may possibly lead to a loss of business, it looks so much stronger to confidently say that your business may not be the best for you.
BoweryJE22