Compelling Startup Pitch Archetypes (with examples from YC companies)

http://www.jasonshen.com/2012/eleven-compelling-startup-pitch-archetypes-with-examples-from-yc-companies/

by jasonshen • 14 years ago

200 28 14 years ago

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Ok, that one is a keeper. :-)

One I've heard which isn't specifically mentioned is the 'Experience Twist' as in "A lot of people need to X and they do it but it sucks because it causes Y. We can do X with less Y."

amirmc• 14 years ago

Nice (and thanks for putting this together). Have to admit that as soon as I read "week over week" growth I was reminded of Demo Day Bingo [1].

[1] http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/demo-day-bingo/

jasonshen8• 14 years ago

Haha. Yes, there were a lot of startups pitching traction on Demo Day, and that makes sense because strong week over week growth is impressive, and most of them probably didn't good enough month over month numbers to pitch.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

Great post, I think you nailed it. It's interesting how few archetypes there really are, unlike business models where it's very difficult to create any sort of encyclopedia because there's no clear taxonomy.

maxniederhofer• 14 years ago

Business models are very well defined. The online business models are product/service sales, subscription, retail, commission, advertising and digital licensing.

The pitch types listed are a good start, but are neither mutually exclusive, nor wholly exhaustive.

droz• 14 years ago

As someone wanting to be better versed in business models, can you point our a resource that provides a clear taxonomy?

felixchan• 14 years ago

Are they ranked by order of effectiveness?

jasonshen8• 14 years ago

I was thinking about doing that, but it really depends on what kind of company you are building and what stage you are at.

One thing Sam Altman has said which is interesting is about the order at which you pitch things. I'm not sure I totally agree but here's a paraphrase below:

Pitching revenue is best. If you can't pitch revenue, pitch users. If you can't pitch users, pitch product. If you can't pitch product, pitch market. If you can't pitch market, pitch team.

cwilson• 14 years ago

I'm glad you commented on this. This entire post is very timely, but I was just thinking about what to do if multiple archetype's apply to you. I'm guessing traction/revenue is almost always going to trump the others, but the idea of mixing a few of them together (without it becoming too confusing) seems like the better strategy?

lux2• 14 years ago

I think Jason deserves a big thanks from the HN community, immensely helpful stuff you've been putting out man!

jasonshen8• 14 years ago

Thanks so much Johnny! I've learned a ton from HN and try my best to share useful things with the community. Just signed up for the festivalist newsletter too, looks like an awesome project.

lux2• 14 years ago

Awesome, don't see you in there though. We've been having some issues with TinyLetter's messages going to spam - if you have a chance, can you see if that happened to you too?

rexreed• 14 years ago

Good post, but I was expecting / hoping to see videos of these pitch archetypes in action or slide decks - did I miss something there?

jasonshen8• 14 years ago

I'd love to provide those, but they are few and far between. It would probably take me 2x longer to write this post if I had to unearth slide decks or videos for each pitch type. Hopefully the "what it sounds like" is enough to get you started.

andreipop• 14 years ago

Awesome post, thanks! FYI, the 6th Archetype has a trailing sentence at the end.

jasonshen8• 14 years ago

Woops! Thanks, fixed.

yurylifshits5• 14 years ago

Another one: high-margin city-level business that can be repeated in every big city in the world.

    Brick and mortar: Starbucks, Jamba Juice, McDonalds, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Kumon

    Online: Groupon, Uber, Yelp, RedBeacon, SkillShare, Thrillist

There are around one thousand cities with 1M+ population. If you can build something novel with 1M$ annual revenue and 20% profit margin that can be repeated for every big city, you can raise in order of 100M$ for global scaling.

GuiA• 14 years ago

If you follow Ries' definition (which seems to be the most accepted and popular), those don't count as startups though.

yurylifshits5• 14 years ago

At some point they all were startups.

These companies follow very different trajectory than classic high-tech ventures. First, they raise little round to build a single city high-margin unique/defensible product. Then they raise big bucks to go global.

It's not about terminology. Local-to-global is an important and a bit YC-neglected strategy to build a great company that changes the world.

jasonshen8• 14 years ago

That's an interesting one. I didn't think much about local/brick and mortar businesses. I bet there's a whole other set of pitches that work for those.

yurylifshits5• 14 years ago

City-level startup can be both online and offline.

Besides Groupon and Uber, there are 42floors, General Assembly, Skillshare, ThrillList, Yelp etc.

Schwolop• 14 years ago

This the best article with a number in its title that I've read this year. :-)

(Although you clearly know the HN audience, having culled the number from the title here!)

yurylifshits5• 14 years ago

"Traction" archetype also has an enterprise version: One or few highly successful enterprise deployments. E.g. you've solved a certain high value problem for a particular corporation and raising money to solve it for all companies.

Cloudera is a typical example. It went from Hadoop platform in Yahoo to Hadoop solutions for everyone.

Other companies who could have used this pitch: Bloom Energy, Yammer, PBWorks, GitHub, Box.net

yurylifshits5• 14 years ago

Another architype is Rethinking from Scratch.

Take a big market with a proven business model that failed to innovate for a long time. Recreate the product from the ground up.

    Cases: Tesla, Bank Simple, GMail, Lytro, iPhone

Compelling Startup Pitch Archetypes (with examples from YC companies)

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