Dragons Den

Every Friday we will be watching an episode of Dragons Den. The following (taken from the Dragons Den website) outlines the important concepts we will be learning.

What makes a pitch standout at auditions?

• Compelling, easy to understand, story (aka an Elevator Pitch) explaining what problem you solve and a product demo illustrating how you add value to the end user / client.
• Traction. Early sales, customer testimonials and industry awards all help show that you aren't the only one who believes in your idea. After all, every pitcher says their idea is great, so you need to show, not say it.
• An answer to the key question of "why you"? What sustainable competitive advantage do you have that makes this the perfect venture for you and your team?
• Scalability, the ability to grow revenue fast while keeping costs down. Scalability is the capacity to reproduce your value added processes at greater and greater margins.
• Just enough passion, to make me believe you will survive the venture birthing process but not enough passion to make me think you are delusional.

While there is no guarantee that having all of the above will win you a pass into the Dragons' Den, not having any of the five will most certainly make some producers say "I'm out".

Pitching Pitfalls

1. “Prototypes are overrated” - If you have a great product you should at least try to produce a few before coming to investors. How else will they believe your solution actually works? In the world of venture capital this is called proof of concept.

2. “I didn't want to go to customers before I had funding” - If you have never talked to a customer how do you know they will buy what you build? Customer feedback is key in a post dot.com world.

3. “Like Gates and Zuckerberg, I too have no education nor experience in my field” - Okay, yes it's true that many of our entrepreneurial superstars dropped out of school and entered fields that were so new no one had experience. But that doesn't mean that it is logical to jump from no experience + no schooling = success.