A common question that my clients ask me is: My customers use a few features on my website only. Why don’t my customers use other good features on my website? Maybe you ask a similar question like my clients, so I’d like to share how I usually start to respond to the question. I usually start to evaluate the low-usage features based on the following questions: [Read more…]
Martina Arroyo-Burton was our Summer intern and helped us to write many of the stories you’ve read over the past few months – we will miss her energy and enthusiasm for the Hong Kong startup scene and asked her to write a few words on her experience and what she saw:
As my time in Hong Kong draws to a close, I realize how much I have enjoyed surrounding myself with Hong Kong’s lifestyle.
As a native New Yorker, I appreciate the resemblance this region has to my hometown. Skyscrapers, efficient public transportation and dense crowds in small spaces are all familiar aspects to me. But just like all cities, Hong Kong has its own identity. In such a contained space, the east and west meet seamlessly, creating an environment that can make any foreigner feel at home.
But one significant difference I have come to acknowledge is the cultural dedication to community. This traditional feature allows many subcultures to grow exponentially, in particularly, the startup scene in Hong Kong. Where else can you encounter an open environment where ideas, backgrounds, skills and knowledge blend effortlessly to create a fertile ground for ingenuity?
Having sat on startup judging panels and seeing a ton of startup pitches, it surprises me how many startup decks miss some of the critical slides needed in a pitch deck.
When putting a pitch deck it’s not there for you to remember what to say – its for your audience to understand what you are saying!
It doesn’t matter if you’re an awesome speaker or not, from the slides an audience should be able to fully understand what you do and get a snapshot into what you are trying to accomplish and its potential.
Remember: good deck flow is more important than the graphic design of the deck, just look at Dave McClure’s decks – a visual nightmare, but an informational paradise.
This ongoing column will spotlight some pitch hacks that I want to share with the Hong Kong startup community.
I was recently on a judging panel for SeedStars World in Hong Kong and like most other pitch events they gave the judges a scoring sheet – but for some reason this is not shared with the startups – we have to score on a scale from 1-10 on 5 different criteria (which is then added up to showcase the startups with the highest scores and then a winner chosen from that pool) usually the startup does not cover at least 2-3 of these criteria in their pitch and the scoring is based more on personal choices than on hitting the key scoring points.
I believe an integral slide in any pitch; and saves wasting time in the Q&A section; is the Competitive Analysis slide.
