pitchcamp
I never cease to be amazed at the way us entrepreneurs will find ways to avoid doing the work we need to do by doing the work we want to believe must be done. I was poking around some mailing lists today and noticed people talking about a PitchCamp. Now I have no idea why I haven't heard of this before. It's apparently a group of people getting together and practicing their pitches and pitching.......
This could be the worst idea I've ever heard. First off if you're practicing your pitch you're not working on your products and if you're practicing your pitches before you even have a product (the impression I got from my reading) well then I find it highly unlikely you'll ever have a product.
Great pitches make themselves. Go out there and do the work. Then when you need to pitch a VC or potential buyer you can say, "Hey, I took a 5K investment off my credit card and turned it into a product that has annual revenues of 300K". How about that for a pitch! Instead of my ajax widget does your laundry and dries your back hair, well if I get your money it will.
Oh and while I'm ranting, how dumb are these stinking VC's? Lately I've gotten more calls from VC flunkies and I'm amazed at their complete lack of research. They almost all make the same mistake with HelpSpot assuming it's hosted. So they start asking me questions about SaaS and I correct them and ask them why they didn't look at the website for a second instead of assuming every product on a web 2.0 list is hosted. Then I hang up.
I realize these arn't the "real" VC's at these firms. They usually sound like MBA interns, but come on. These guys are out there cold calling and ruinng your good (average?) name by making you sound like complete idiots incapable of reading a simple web page.