BaseKit

Our final day. We’ve soaked a lot of the advice we’ve received and accumulated it all in to our final presentation. We worked through the night to perfect our pitch whilst resurrecting our original demo that we brought to the Seedcamp 10 minute interview.

Knowing from experience, we needed to show our product and produce that wow factor so that the investors would remember us. Our demo was building the Seedcamp website in BaseKit and within 3 minutes. The idea was to show a relevant use case to spark the imagination of the audience and prove that BaseKit has the capabilities to be used a professional website creation tool.

The content of the presentation was the trickiest though. We didn’t want to repeat the pitch we showed at the start of the week but we found it hard to create relevant, but different content. So we decided that we would keep the demo down to 2 minutes and then talk about our Seedcamp experience; what we have learned and what people have said about our product. On reflection, it was important that we discussed our Seedcamp journey as it showed that we are flexible enough to listen to advice. It also kept the audience engaged as it was an journey that we traveled together.

We were second to last and as always, things were running behind time but our time to pitch came around quickly! It was Simon and Richard Best that pitched the product, whilst I made sure the slides and demo ran smoothly (A lesson hard learned! Ask us about our Seedcamp Interview Demo!). We then all equally took an share at answering the questions. Thankfully, everything went exactly as expected!

The main lessons we learned in terms of our pitch:

• Show the demo! Thinking back, all the winners had demos. So a demo is a must!
• Get into the demo as soon as possible; People want to see it!
• If you have a technical product, don’t be over technical. The technical content in our first presentation was pretty in-depth. We changed this in our final presentation, we talked on a higher level rather talking about widgets, events, methods, binding etc. The last thing you want to do is confuse your audience.
• A common misconception is that you believe that you should have all the answers. Wrong! There are some things that you will never know until you launch the product / service. What you do need to know is the questions that need to be answered and a plan on how you are going about finding the answers.
• Investors want to hear about your ideas on making money, so tell them!
• Practice and have a backup plan for when things go wrong (they will – so expect it!).
• Have no more than 2 people present. Ideally you want one person, but we used two. Simon for the technical side of the presentation and Richard for the rest. If one person can do both, then just use one. Using more than two people is distracting and dilutes the message.

So we finally got to the end of Seedcamp Week! Exhausted, we made our way down to the TechCrunch Party for a well deserved drink. Phew! What a week! But worth every strand of effort.