First, let’s celebrate that this blog, supporting the startup book The Titanic Effect: Successfully Navigating the Uncertainties that Sink Most Startups has been active for one year. Yes, that is right - these timely tidbits have been coming to you for 1 year. How do we know it’s been one year? We know, because we wrote the first blogpost on our way to the How I Built This (HIBT) Summit in 2018. Next week, we return for the 2019 HIBT Summit.

In honor of the HIBT Summit, we want to share words of advice we heard last year from Natalia Oberti Noguera who founded Pipeline Angels, has been dubbed “The Coach” by Marie Claire, and who hosts a podcast on pitching called Pitch Makeover. She did a segment on teaching people how to pitch in one minute. We appreciate her formula for pitching and want to share it with you all:

1. Talk about the Problem you are trying to solve. This is the critical setup where you show you understand customers and their needs. If you don’t know customers’ pain points and what they are willing to pay for, you will not be successful.

2. Describe how your Solution solves their Problem. You have to show that you are offering a value to customers. You have to improve on the functionality they already get. Some people think you should have 10x functionality or 5x functionality. The key here is that you have to offer something better than what they have today. This also demonstrates that you have business model.

3. Say how you are better than the Competition. Startups sometimes want to say “we have no competitors.” This is a huge red flag to investors. All startups have competition. It might be indirect, or do nothing. But, there is competition. So, take the competition head-on. Say what they do and what you do. Showcase how you are better.

4. Share who is on your Team. While the solo founder taking on the world has romantic connotations, the reality is that investors like to see that you can recruit others to help you. Not having a team suggests you either cannot partner with others or don’t understand what it takes to scale. They want to bet on a team of people who can overcome barriers and create a successful startup. So, build a team.

So, think about your investors before you pitch. Understand the metrics that they will use to assess your pitch and your startup. Tell them about the issues they are expecting to hear about. Anticipate their questions and you will be more successful.

Once you get to the MVP (Minimally Viable Product), it’s not time yet to relax. You’ve got to keep working through how your product development is going to evolve. But first, let’s celebrate the successes - your startup has validated that the product fits the market, and the design team has produced an MVP to get customer feedback. Most likely, you also have a good mental map of next steps. 

We frequently get asked the question: Why did you write this book? What do you hope to get out of it? Our primary objective is to help founders and those who support startups be more successful. But the greatest book in the world can only go so far—and we are far from that! To bring the book to life, and hopefully make it actionable, we have created some tools startups can use.

Some of our posts have provided general guidelines for what to avoid at different stages of a startup. This week, we’d like to dig into an example of startup failure and show how these icebergs are fatal. Let’s look at Theranos. 

You may know the overall story. It starts with a young, Stanford student (Elizabeth Holmes) who has a great idea: build a device that runs a wide range of tests on a single drop of blood.

First of all, developing new products is not easy by any means. Sometimes, it even seems downright impossible. Along the way, it’s highly likely that a product will accumulate some “technical debt” in its development process. So, let’s talk more about technical debt – what is it and where does it come from?