Blog Assignment - week 5 (final)

Hello to those who read this blog, this is going to be the final blog assignment for this paper and as the requirement have to evaluate and critique two chosen "elevator pitch" from the website http://pitches.techcrunch.com/.

What is elevator pitch? I see it as explaining or pitching your ideas to the investors in a short time frame. When explaining it needs to be to the point and should convey the overall picture of your product that you are trying to sell. Keeping the speech clear and simple would potentially give an edge over others.

The two pitches that I stumbled upon and found quite interesting and empowering was:

OpenFilm and SmugMug.

The link to OpenFilm pitch is http://pitches.techcrunch.com/pitch/196-openfilm. The reason for the selection is very simple, I believed the speech to be convincing and that the idea was a selling product. The co-founder of the site spoke clearly and meticulously conveying the key point of the site. His body language showed that he had prepared himself before hand with the speech and the flow of words came out beautifully. The site is a web 2.0 site for good quality video sharing for short films and videos alike. The Co-Founder addresses that the site would benefit Independent film makers, as they require web service that provides a good quality playback of their short film. Youtube does not provide this functionality, as their videos are not great quality. Anyone can use this site to upload a good quality video, which gets screened for production quality and copyright issues before the video is uploaded onto the site. This I believe is a seller for me, as it would attract a niche market of followers.



SmugMug on the other hand is a quality photo sharing site, but its not free rather a commercial site where you pay for service. The link to the pitch is http://pitches.techcrunch.com/pitch/16-smugmug.



Once again this pitch was more empowering then the other because the speaker was being very optimistic about his idea that his charm came through in 29 seconds (one of the fastest pitcher). His approach was to mention that SmugMug is a premium photo sharing service and comparing it to first class service from an Airliner and BIG companies like BMW and Toyota in the car industry. He also mentioned that there is no advertisement, just good quality picture sharing, this would have got people interested, as users don't want to see Ad when going through pictures. At the end he says the punch line "hundreds of thousands paying customers, we are profitable, bootstrapped and growing fast", which would have got the investors talking. I was impressed with the speech and his confidence, but I wonder how well the business is going really, since there are free sites like flickr to upload pictures to.