How $1½m Seed Funding Is Secured

I happened across spirited Techcrunch praise for a 20-yr old that’s just had her fledgling firm funded. Intriguingly, there’s a 2-minute video where she’s asked to explain the wonders of her invention.

You’d expect a sassy, snappy pitch. Surely someone in this position would have a seasoned approach, and have the sell off-pat. I know you can argue this was all a tad informal and the like, but really, this stuff is important and should be second nature so is unlikely to be far removed from how the pitch ran in meetings with prospective funders.

Watching it yourself, there’s strangely only three noteworthy tips, along with a general lesson to avoid unnecessary waffle. There’s a decent start from an intro summing-up sentence.

A real-time financial dashboard for businesses

But there’s a snag. There’s no differentiator hammered home here.

What’s the angle? Where’s the edge? Why could I not live without this? How will it change my life?

Unfortunately, there then follows 30secs of redundant nuts ‘n bolt feature-style description. Things eventually pick up with this proof.

We launched just about a month ago
We have a few thousand businesses using us
We’re tracking a few hundred million dollars already

Great evidence, albeit in woolly roundabout language. No need to be so modest in dropping it casually in as an afterthought though… how bizarrely un-American.

Then there’s the meat. Everyone loves a good demo. The prevailing venture capital wisdom appears to be get into the demo as early as poss. I tend to concur.

It seems harsh to critique her demo technique, as the purpose of showing her pet client’s superb custom-made table tennis ball sales on her iPad appears more to do with proving the service exists and looks App-y enough rather than showing any key benefit. It would have been cool to see the one figure (or game-changing click) either she herself thinks is so unique or her Mr Ping Pong always goes to.

The pitch ends with a tantalising statement from the cameraman.

So it’s basically Mint for businesses?

I do like the approach of using established market leaders as frames of reference. Even though I myself am unfamiliar with ‘Mint’, hopefully it means something to her target demographic, as marketers like to say.

All in all, a pitch with clinch is always a good one, even if there’s room for improvement. Nevertheless, congrats go out to Jessica Mah for securing inDinero’s sought seeding, and all the best for future growth.