
Getting better at pitching - zxed
I speak really fast; not because I’m nervous, but when I slow down, I forget what I wanted to say next.<p>I applied to W19 last year and after we found out that we were invited to meet and interview in person, I wanted to do something to be better prepared at the inperson pitch.<p>I asked a few people if they would listen to me pitch or answer some basic questions like, what are you working on.<p>I shared the points and content I wanted to cover beforehand.<p>The feedback was consistent - “slow down, we didn’t understand half the stuff you said”<p>So I put together a tool that would listen to me as I practiced and it would figure out what I said. I used it to enunciate better (when I didn’t it wouldn’t pick up what I said), get better at pacing my words, and help verbalize content around keywords.<p>It’s basically a console app, but as I’m gearing up for to apply for S19 - I wanted to see if this would be useful to others.... I’ve slowly started converting it to a web app and have a bit more work to go before it’s usable by others.
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_ah
I read an interesting technique for improving presentations: 1\. Create an
outline, then record yourself pitching freeform from the outline. Practice
many times until you get a recording that seems perfect. 2\. Then, memorize
that recording WORD-FOR-WORD, until you can deliver the "spontaneous" pitch
with perfect timing every time.

I can't find the source right now, but I'm pretty sure it was an interview
with Donovan Brown talking about his presentation technique @ Microsoft.

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zxed
That’s actually very close to what my mock ups look like (and what my console
app does). The only difference is the word-for-word. I have a hard time
recovering if someone cuts me off so I found that keeping track of key points
I wanted to make let’s me organically recover (even if it’s slightly different
words). So in this app, the first step is to copy-past your 5-6 sentence
script. Then select keywords , and then pitch to it :). But yes, awesome
insights, do let me know if you find the article. I’m planning on having the
first demo version ready tomorrow -

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ohiovr
Might be useful to think of the problem like a radio or tv ad. What can you
say in 30 seconds that could be memorable or interesting enough to warrant
further interest? Write a script and read it into a voice recorder. Then
listen to see if the pace is natural. After doing this a few times you should
begin to hear the most important aspects shine through. It costs money to have
a tv ad. And it might as well be an opportunity cost in real life.

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zxed
Interesting angle. The tool I have doesn’t record or playback the audio. I’m
using a transcribing engine to convert it to text to see what it captures. I
figured that if a machine can figure it out, then almost any human can
understand what I said.

I then use a summarizing machine learning algorithm to see if the output
matches the summary of what I wanted to convey.

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zxed
Here’s the link to the upcoming page on product hunt. I’ll post the link here
once it’s resdy to try out.

[https://www.producthunt.com/my/upcoming/pitchiq](https://www.producthunt.com/my/upcoming/pitchiq)

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kohanz
This may or may not matter to you, but there's a few startups/apps out there
tackling public speaking improvement. Orai, for example. A friend of mine is
in a similar space and discovers new competitors all the time.

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zxed
This is perfect / I was hoping someone would post what’s already out there and
that’s really what I was looking for and forgot to ask in my original post.

Unlike Orai, I’m not doing this for $’s - no subscription, no ads, just
free... :). It won’t be as fancy, but will give you the same features as I saw
on the App Store.

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rman666
I don’t think I have this problem, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it when it’s
ready.

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zxed
:) appreciate the straightforwardness - it seems like it has limited use;
maybe people starting out new in sales or customer support who need to
memorize scripts might get use out of it?

