Pitch coaching – YowTRIP

Thanks to everybody who has submitted a pitch in response to my post on pitch coaching. As I mentioned in the post, I’ll post some of the pitches & my feedback to help people refine their pitches. I’ll focus my commentary on 3 main questions:

1) Have you clearly outlined the problem & how your product/service addresses it?
2) Have you covered the main areas investors are interested in?
3) Have you generated a sense of interest that your company has real potential that people will want to take the time to learn more in a more in depth meeting?

As I’m not familiar with every company’s domain, I’ll more focus on the structure of the pitch and leave the fact checking of the content to the wisdom of the crowd.

For YowTRIP, the presentation is located here.

My feedback I gave is as follows.

Have you clearly outlined the problem & how your product/service addresses it?

Yes – this was well communicated

Have you covered the main areas investors are interested in (market potential, revenue model, competition, management, go to market strategy, exit, deal terms)

This needs some work. Some key questions I would have would be:

a) How does your site make money (ads, taking a commission on travel booked, etc)?
b) What is the market potential? How much revenue do you think your company can make based on point (a)?
c) Who are your main competitors (direct and in-direct)?
d) Who is on the management team?
e) How will investors likely realize an exit (acquisition, dividend stream, etc)?

Have you generated a sense of interest that your company has real potential that people will want to take the time to learn more in a more in depth meeting?

Granted this is subjective, but to me this seems like a very specialized niche in an already crowded space. i.e. on-line travel sites, other social networking sites could be used to offer a solution to your problem statement. I’m not sure what your previous business model was, but since you have some past history, if you can show some traction that people would use your site (i.e. visits, user sign-ups), this would go a long way to showing the viability of your idea. Otherwise you are in the same position with other social network based start-ups – the viability of your company will be largely based on how many people you can get into your network and how achievable is this in a crowded marketplace with already established dominant players.