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The Toughest Audience to Pitch? It’s Not VCs

This guest blog post by Vinit Patil, CEO, MeetRibbon, which first appeared on March 6, 2015, is being republished with his permission because it shares timeless wisdom with startup entrepreneurs.

They’re candid. They have a ton of questions. They will make you sweat. And they have a huge influence over the entire adult demographic. Take a guess.

Kids. Yes, those darn adorable kids.

I had the honor to pitch The Pricerie at the City of Palo Alto’s Rinconada Library where parents brought their kids to hear startup founders talk about their business. This is a program called AlligatorZone started by Ramesh Sambasivan where “Kids meet cool startups”. That night, it was Jon Li, founder of Vibin Photo Notes and me.

Jon went first. As I watched Jon present I grew more nervous. The kids between ages 5–12 were pretty straight with their questions.

“I tried downloading your app” said one of the kids. “It says 99 cents. I thought you said it was free.”

“You might be looking at a different app,” said Jon, “There are plenty of photo note apps. Look for Vibin Photonotes.”

“OK, how are people supposed to find it?” said the kid.

Good question.

How are people supposed to find Vibin Photo Notes. What’s going to be Jon’s iTunes store discovery strategy. Something for Jon to think hard about.

I was next. Here are my takeaways from the entire experience.

Find how you can connect

They are not interested in your business jargon. So find common kid ground. Jon for example asked “who likes to take pictures? And then used a lemonade stand to explain the affilitate model. Brilliant.

My turn. The Pricerie is a pricing service. Not a lot kids care about pricing.

I had to boil it down to one question that could resonate with all kids.

“Who likes to draw?

For VCs it might be a different question. Who wants to make money? Or who wants to change the world? Who wants to invest in healthcare?

But for kids it was about drawing. I built on that.

Keep your Pitch Quick and Simple

I started telling the kids “Well someday you might grow up and get really good at drawing. You might put it on a t-shirt. People might like your t-shirts and ask how much you are selling them for. You might not have a clue how to answer that.

Hence the Pricerie. We’ll pair you with store owners who will help you figure out how much to sell it for.”

Kids are smart, restless and fearless. No place to hide.

The experience forced me to state the problem in the most simple and relatable form. I’m sure no VC one ever heard a pitch and said this is too simple. Can you complicate it just a little?

Answer follow up questions in short, easy to understand sentences

There’s always that temptation to to give a long detailed answers. Kids have no patience for that. They’re already thinking about their next question. Similarly, VCs have their phones and email on their phones. Your answer needs to be shorter and more interesting than what’s on their phones.

I tried my best to keep all my answers down to a sentence or two.

For example:

Question: Can makers raise of lower their price if they don’t like your price? Answer: Yes. It’s your product. Ultimately you get to decide. This is just a validation from a trusted source.

The kids also understand big words like validation, so there’s no need to dumb it down.

Be Honest

Kids won’t hesitate to call out your BS. So don’t try to act bigger or smarter than you are. If you are not making any money, tell the truth. If they ask about how many users you have, tell the truth. If they ask how you are going to charge, tell the truth.

I was caught off guard when asked how the community prices things versus retailers. We just didn’t have enough data to give a really informed answer. I said I don’t know, I’ll have to check on that but my guess is the new members of the community price too low.

Normally adults, unless they are reporters, can be a bit reserved. The flurry of questions from the kids emboldened the adults, who in turn also asked a lot of questions.

Whew!

Next time I plan on pitching a VC, I’ll pitch it to my kid first.

Vinit Patil, currently CEO of MeetRibbon, presented a previous venture, The Pricerie, a pricing service for makers, of which he was co-founder, and artist partner at the junk rescue initiative The Whiteout. This guest post, originally written by Vinit on March 6, 2015, has been republished by AlligatorZone with his permission. MeetRibbon is addressing a critical gap in the trade show and showroom industry—helping physical events embrace the power of a modern, multi-vendor platform to run their e-commerce year-round.

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Are Youth Entrepreneurship Events Starting To Reek of Child Pageants?

May 12, 2016

At a recent conference I had the opportunity to ask Dave McClure a two-part question: (a) How young is too young for an entrepreneur, and what’s the youngest age at which he has funded a startup founder, and (b) as Peter Thiel encouraged founders to drop out of college and launch a startup, is it possible that as entrepreneurship starts attracting kid entrants a kid-entrepreneur may want to drop out of elementary-school or middle-school?

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Fad or Fab

Is it a fad that is seeping into our culture manifesting as children on stage doing MBA-speak, or is it fabulous and worthy of celebration? Is youth entrepreneurship the new flavor of the month? Is coding by kids so yesterday? Or is youth entrepreneurship so yesterday, as even younger children start talking the entrepreneurship talk? As another summer rolls in, are entrepreneurship boot-camps for children in season? After all, it is a natural corollary of summer camp for theater and the arts. When startup founders in the real world and on reality TV shows are judged by their theatrics, the world of startup pitches has started blending with the world of theater.  This is now evident in startup pitches by kids, of kids, and for kids. Pitches by children so well-scripted with clever one-liners, so well-rehearsed and so entertaining that Youth Shakespeare Festivals in summer may soon be a thing of the past!

Here’s the problem with such an over-emphasis on the pitch.

  • We are not allowing our children to learn problem-solving.
  • We are not teaching our children that building a business is a lot more than preparing to perform on stage to entertain elders in the audience.
  • We are not teaching them that use of business jargon is unnecessary.
  • We are not letting them figure out grit.
  • We are not teaching them about putting substance alongside style.
  • We are not letting them to be themselves.  To be kids.

Let Their Work Speak

This reminds me of a grocery store in Mumbai.  It was a hot summer day. The cashier at the grocery store was a little kid. The store owner’s son.  He was perched on a wooden stool behind the counter, his bare feet dangling, his one hand dipped in coins in the cashier’s drawer and the other ready to grab the phone.  His father was busy taking orders from customers in the store, wrapping up grocery items for them, who would then line up in front of the kid at the cash register.  The father would shout out the price of each item to the boy.  And he would add them up mentally, collect cash, and calculate the change mentally before returning them to the customers.  He was learning a good work ethic, arithmetic, mental calculations, and good customer-service. Every adult who walked out of the store was impressed by the quiet confidence the boy exuded. The little boy’s work was his pitch.

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Seen above, kids and their families step forward to play with Leia, Inc.’s holographic web navigation prototypes at an AlligatorZone session in Mountain View, California.

No stress.

At AlligatorZone, where kids meet cool startups we like to eliminate any pressure on the kids.  It is a time for them to immerse themselves in a product show-and-tell by startup founders. There are no pitches, there is no contest, just observing a product in action and satisfying their innate curiosity through a free-wheeling conversation with the founders, and an opportunity for a community to share perspectives that might help a startup founder avoid mishaps in her or his entrepreneurial journey.  We want to take AlligatorZone to as many libraries as possible because we now have a proven template that allows for kids and youth to be coached to run sessions locally, while we curate the content and give coaching to the startup founders as needed on how best to present to kids and youth. Librarians tell us that this program gives underprivileged kids and youth a chance to dream and be inspired by a local founder, knowing they too could pull it off.  And because it is a shared experience for the parents and kids, we are told that AlligatorZone gives families something to talk about at home with their teens and kids.   AlligatorZone makes for an uplifting community gathering each time it is held in a public library.

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Seen in the picture above is Harsha Prahlad, CEO and founder of GrabIt, Inc., demonstrating a wall-climbing robot that uses electroadhesion technology at an AlligatorZone session in Santa Clara, CA.

No contest. No trophies.

We often receive suggestions from business consultants and coaches about what could be next for AlligatorZone, and the one thing we often hear is to have a contest, have kids pitch their ideas, and give away trophies for the kids.  We have deliberately stayed away from contests for kids. At AlligatorZone, we want the children and the youth to focus on learning by listening, observing, having fun voicing opinions, and having conversations with startup founders, having silly conversations with other kids and having interesting career conversations with their families when the opportunity presents itself at home.

In the race for entrepreneurial success, we may like to see children conquering the world, but let it not be at the cost of a carefree childhood. It is up to the grown-ups to shield the children from the glare of the real world.

We always encourage entrepreneurs to look at the world through the eyes of a child. What if the child has lost out on its childhood, playing the role of an entrepreneur that the world expects?

At AlligatorZone we want kids to first be themselves. To be kids. Curious kids. Silly kids. Playful kids.

AlligatorZone is a social-impact program designed by SiliconGlades, the design and innovation firm with a social conscience in its work. Learn more about this uplifting program at AlligatorZone.org.