Know-How

Welcome to a slightly different guide and blog post! Instead of overwhelming you with preachy advice, today I'd like to give you a few tips on how to make sure you mess up your next pitch. I thought this might be more entertaining and just as helpful in the end. If you like my approach, perhaps you'd like to write a few of your complementary experiences in the comments?

Literature tips and books for founders are a dime a dozen on the internet. But our list is different: we don't just present books that provide you with hard skills and methods. Our literature tips go further and also address your personal development. Because if you no longer function as a founder, your startup will also falter.

The third part concludes the series and describes my understanding of how to prepare for a successful start to your work. Information and decisions that you need and materials that will support you in your work in the best possible way.

"COMPETITION ANALYSIS? WE DON'T NEED IT!"

I often hear these or similar sentences in my work as a startup coach. In the pitch deck of startups in the early phase, it is noticeable that the competitive analysis section in particular is either completely missing or has been designed with little thought.

Jobs to be Done in action... It was at the end of 2015 when I met up with an entrepreneur friend of mine in a bar. He had founded his start-up a few months ago. I wanted to hear from him how he was doing and, above all, how his business idea was progressing. His idea was to programme an app that would show partygoers from the Rhine-Main region and later other regions "what's going on in clubs and bars". He and his company wanted to make the city even more exciting. The use case was described as follows:

Two things are usually very scarce for start-ups and founders: time and money. Fortunately, however, there are more and more apps and programmes that make life easier for start-ups, sometimes even at zero cost.
We have compiled a list of our best tools for start-ups and founders.

It is in the nature of things that not every idea becomes a successful company. With all the respect we rightly have for the "heroic failure" of the entrepreneur. It is fate that 95 per cent of start-ups do not make it.

Why do you need a good understanding of why your customers buy products or use services? Experience shows that the answer to this why is both a serious challenge and one of your most important assets. When I ask founders in my workshops and coaching sessions to answer this why in a few words, most answers are vague at best and have more to do with the what and the how than with a comprehensible "logic" of a future purchase decision.