How to write a good elevator pitch

I am back from the TechCrunch party and I'm overwhelmed by the crowd. I've met some interesting and smart people like Scott Wheeler from Directed Edge, and many others. I've also met many of my friends, but I already know that they're interesting and smart, so it was no so big surprise.

Anyway, there were seven or eight start-up elevator pitches presented, and I was quite happy to see the presenters well prepared. I hate boring presentations, and believe me, you can get people bored in less than two minutes.

I remember when my friend and I wrote a TV sitcom pitch. It is possible that our sitcom was funny, but the pitch definitely wasn't. We tried so hard to put too much on one page that we lost our main desire: fun. Or pitch failed and so did we.

It is hard to be short. Look at me, this is my forth paragraph, you've already read 158 words, and I haven't tell you anything about writing good elevator pitch yet.

Here it is: Solve my problem.

It's not easy to do, but that's the point. Don't tell me who you are, how many employees you have, don't bother me with your blabla mission. Just tell me you have a solution for my problem.

Do you need to understand your data, do you need to have a report prepared for tomorrow presentation but your IT department cannot help you? We in Good Data can. Yes, it is on-demand, software-as-a-service, collaborative, Ajax, heuristic ETL, automatic, intuitive - but these are only features. Who cares, if it solves your problem?

I believe that when you do something, it solves somebody's problem. Find that somebody, invite her to an elevator, and tell her your solution. If it really solves the problem, you can always present your company later.

Are you fed up?

Mark Smith writes:

The current situation should have business mad as hell and fed up. With so much of an organization's IT budget being spent on technology, but the situation in business having gotten a whole lot worse, now what? I would recommend that business either take back control of their BI destiny or just write them off as educational experiments. Another choice is to develop a new strategy built on the demands for information and analytics that might need to completely bypass IT and outsource to a supplier that provides software as a service (SaaS) and just requires data feeds to populate their analytics and BI capabilities.

Mark Smith: Why Business Should Be Mad as Hell at IT
The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

At today's Open Coffee Club, we have talked just about that. The following question emerged: Will IT fight back? Do they feel that SaaS makes them useless and incompetent?

In my opinion, IT departments are not happy about consuming so much time on operations and deployment, and the SaaS concept will force them to focus on the boring stuff more and more.

Poor IT!

On the need for on-demand business intelligence tools

On-demand BI, let's imagine it! - a friend of mine was excited. - It can be here in a few years!

Well, - I opposed, - it's already here for several years, but the huge companies haven't noticed it yet.

In a huge company like a bank, time is flowing differently. What can be done in hours, it takes weeks there, and nobody is concerned, nobody notices.

A new report? Ok, if you have such an idea, you go to business people, they discuss its business case and prepare its business design. Then it's IT move. The business design is not easy to implement, one has to change this and that, that attribute is not in the data warehouse yet and maybe you need a completely new datamart...

And there you are: Your new report is ready to be used in three or six months. At that time you realize it's not exactly what you need.

Can you be happy with it? Many people in the big companies are, and they are convinced it's the only way how it can work.

It is not. Time is running fast elsewhere.