
Compelling Startup Pitch Archetypes (with examples from YC companies) - jasonshen
http://www.jasonshen.com/2012/eleven-compelling-startup-pitch-archetypes-with-examples-from-yc-companies/
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yurylifshits
Another one: high-margin city-level business that can be repeated in every big
city in the world.

    
    
        Brick and mortar: Starbucks, Jamba Juice, McDonalds, Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, Kumon
    
        Online: Groupon, Uber, Yelp, RedBeacon, SkillShare, Thrillist
    

There are around one thousand cities with 1M+ population. If you can build
something novel with 1M$ annual revenue and 20% profit margin that can be
repeated for every big city, you can raise in order of 100M$ for global
scaling.

~~~
jasonshen
That's an interesting one. I didn't think much about local/brick and mortar
businesses. I bet there's a whole other set of pitches that work for those.

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yurylifshits
City-level startup can be both online and offline.

Besides Groupon and Uber, there are 42floors, General Assembly, Skillshare,
ThrillList, Yelp etc.

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jasonshen
The thing about those is that ultimately the city-by-city approach is a
distribution strategy. A single jamaba juice can exist on its own.

For Uber or 42Floors to succeed with venture backing, they really need to
dominate a large market (like all major cities in the US). Thus the pitch
still becomes much more high level and not focused on individual units.

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ChuckMcM
Ok, that one is a keeper. :-)

One I've heard which isn't specifically mentioned is the 'Experience Twist' as
in "A lot of people need to X _and they do it_ but it sucks because it causes
Y. We can do X with less Y."

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yurylifshits
"Traction" archetype also has an enterprise version: One or few highly
successful enterprise deployments. E.g. you've solved a certain high value
problem for a particular corporation and raising money to solve it for all
companies.

Cloudera is a typical example. It went from Hadoop platform in Yahoo to Hadoop
solutions for everyone.

Other companies who could have used this pitch: Bloom Energy, Yammer, PBWorks,
GitHub, Box.net

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amirmc
Nice (and thanks for putting this together). Have to admit that as soon as I
read "week over week" growth I was reminded of Demo Day Bingo [1].

[1] <http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/demo-day-bingo/>

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jasonshen
Haha. Yes, there were a lot of startups pitching traction on Demo Day, and
that makes sense because strong week over week growth is impressive, and most
of them probably didn't good enough month over month numbers to pitch.

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yurylifshits
Another architype is Rethinking from Scratch.

Take a big market with a proven business model that failed to innovate for a
long time. Recreate the product from the ground up.

    
    
        Cases: Tesla, Bank Simple, GMail, Lytro, iPhone

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Alex3917
Great post, I think you nailed it. It's interesting how few archetypes there
really are, unlike business models where it's very difficult to create any
sort of encyclopedia because there's no clear taxonomy.

~~~
maxniederhofer
Business models are very well defined. The online business models are
product/service sales, subscription, retail, commission, advertising and
digital licensing.

The pitch types listed are a good start, but are neither mutually exclusive,
nor wholly exhaustive.

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droz
As someone wanting to be better versed in business models, can you point our a
resource that provides a clear taxonomy?

~~~
te_chris
Business Model Generation[1] seems to be the canonical work about this sort of
thing

[1] <http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/>

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lux
I think Jason deserves a big thanks from the HN community, immensely helpful
stuff you've been putting out man!

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jasonshen
Thanks so much Johnny! I've learned a ton from HN and try my best to share
useful things with the community. Just signed up for the festivalist
newsletter too, looks like an awesome project.

~~~
lux
Awesome, don't see you in there though. We've been having some issues with
TinyLetter's messages going to spam - if you have a chance, can you see if
that happened to you too?

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Schwolop
This the best article with a number in its title that I've read this year. :-)

(Although you clearly know the HN audience, having culled the number from the
title here!)

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felixchan
Are they ranked by order of effectiveness?

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jasonshen
I was thinking about doing that, but it really depends on what kind of company
you are building and what stage you are at.

One thing Sam Altman has said which is interesting is about the order at which
you pitch things. I'm not sure I totally agree but here's a paraphrase below:

Pitching revenue is best. If you can't pitch revenue, pitch users. If you
can't pitch users, pitch product. If you can't pitch product, pitch market. If
you can't pitch market, pitch team.

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cwilson
I'm glad you commented on this. This entire post is very timely, but I was
just thinking about what to do if multiple archetype's apply to you. I'm
guessing traction/revenue is almost always going to trump the others, but the
idea of mixing a few of them together (without it becoming too confusing)
seems like the better strategy?

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jasonshen
Definitely many startups end up using several different angles over the course
of a 30+ min conversation. I think generally you'll end up have one archetype
that is really the most important.

Think about it this way - when someone asks the investor why they backed you,
they are going to have a one sentence answer. "Because _____" What do you want
that sentence to be? That is your archetype.

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rexreed
Good post, but I was expecting / hoping to see videos of these pitch
archetypes in action or slide decks - did I miss something there?

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jasonshen
I'd love to provide those, but they are few and far between. It would probably
take me 2x longer to write this post if I had to unearth slide decks or videos
for each pitch type. Hopefully the "what it sounds like" is enough to get you
started.

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andreipop
Awesome post, thanks! FYI, the 6th Archetype has a trailing sentence at the
end.

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jasonshen
Woops! Thanks, fixed.

