This Monday I visited the Pirate Summit Stockholm. Pirate summit global is a start-up conference held each year. The participants are carefully selected to increase the value for everyone participating. Everyone you talk to at the summit could give you some sort of value. The Pirate Summit don’t want to take money from the start-up’s that already have short of capital, they want to actually give them something.
The event begun with two speakers; one from Northcap and one from 500Startups, which both gave advice on how to run a start-up. The first speaker, from Northcap, said that there is four types of pitches: Technology, Traction, Vision and Team, where most pitches are either Vision and Team because they are the simplest to preform. The Traction pitch is the one you should give to investors. What’s interesting is that many believe that they make the technology pitch, although, according to the speaker, there are fewer technology pitches than one think. The second speaker, from 500Startups, talked about the Nordic market as their next focus and gave advice on what they look for in a pitch. It was three main focuses:
- Live products (MVP or more, not only in the idea stage)
- Growth data from at least a fem months (3-4 months at least)
- Revenue à the start-up should make revenue or have a clear path on how and when to make revenue.
After these two presentations, it was time for the pitch competition. Very exciting! Seven start-ups pitched and the rules were as follows: 3 minutes pitch and 2 minutes Q&A from investors. So it was very real, although I think that the investors questions in general where too kind, they could have been tougher.
Two pitches won and the price was to go to Pirate Summit Global in September this year. The two who won was iControl and MiK. I had some problem understanding the product of iControl, even though the pitcher was good. But it hade something to do with production site and their product was an app that would decrease their time for reporting. Their slogan was “never write a report again”. I really liked the idea behind MiK, which is a platform for home-chefs to connect with hungry people via an app. Their business model is to take a service fee on each payment. I actually downloaded the app at the meeting because their pitch made me curious.
In general, all the pitches begun with stating “the problem” and then going directly to “the solution” which was their product. Only a few showed their business model and revenue stream because they ran out of time. I would definitively suggest those who didn’t have enough time to practice more and knowing the time limit.
It was a great meeting which I could imagine myself participating in again.
You find a link to my tweet here:
Great pitches at Pirate Summit Stockholm #PSGlobal #me2062 #KTH pic.twitter.com/Kr2FE6b0xI
— gunni (@gunzorr) May 23, 2016