Lessons Learned - Week 11
Previous week, our (tough) mission was to identify the key costs and build the financial plan of our business. Hence, three financial sheets have been covered by each group on the Monday class: the Cash Flow statements, the Profit & Loss document and the Balance sheet. Each group estimated the financial projections for the three first years of the start-up life. Despite all of us have been following finance courses and got experience and knowledge regarding this discipline, estimating costs and income resulted to be highly confusing for each group. Indeed, worried about being economically viable, one mistake has been quite recurrent: we all have been too much optimist regarding income while under-estimating our costs hence, our financial projections were not very realist.
The teachers probably anticipated how hard was it and particularly, how frustrating it was to be told the work we made was completely wrong so they decided to attribute a “Reward Prize” to each group, based on 5 different characteristics: structure, validation, presentations, business models, interviews and design. After receiving the 1st prize for the best blog according to the “hypothesis validation”, our team felt great again! It was also a nice way to learn from the others and be tempted to check their work.
Furthermore, we discussed how to make a great and appealing pitch presentation, which is the final step. It was useful to watch at the pitch made by the representative of the Tred Company during the TechDemoDay. [Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjJjKxsRDlU]. This was inspiring and as we were eager to learn more about “how to make a great pitch” so we kept looking for other ones and found out an interesting one: Twoodo.
[Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSk3xO2-3rE]
So, as a group, we discussed afterwards what we liked about those pitches, shared our points of view and what could we take from them thus, converged to the idea that, the more minimalist a digital support is and the clearer the discourse is, the better it looks and sounds. Moreover, the way you behave in front of the crowd and investors play an important role. An added value for the pitch is to coordinate the speaking part with a video support (prototype in the back sound off) so as to help people understand better the concept.
To make the most of a pitch, Guy Kawasaki, addressed a message to young entrepreneurs (like us) by developing the “10(slides)/20(minutes)/30 (font size)” pitch rule. However, this rule has been adapted to us so as to fit more with our content and needs: 7(minutes)/10(slides)/28(font size). It’s more relevant to focus on 10 specific points which are:
The teachers probably anticipated how hard was it and particularly, how frustrating it was to be told the work we made was completely wrong so they decided to attribute a “Reward Prize” to each group, based on 5 different characteristics: structure, validation, presentations, business models, interviews and design. After receiving the 1st prize for the best blog according to the “hypothesis validation”, our team felt great again! It was also a nice way to learn from the others and be tempted to check their work.
Furthermore, we discussed how to make a great and appealing pitch presentation, which is the final step. It was useful to watch at the pitch made by the representative of the Tred Company during the TechDemoDay. [Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjJjKxsRDlU]. This was inspiring and as we were eager to learn more about “how to make a great pitch” so we kept looking for other ones and found out an interesting one: Twoodo.
[Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSk3xO2-3rE]
So, as a group, we discussed afterwards what we liked about those pitches, shared our points of view and what could we take from them thus, converged to the idea that, the more minimalist a digital support is and the clearer the discourse is, the better it looks and sounds. Moreover, the way you behave in front of the crowd and investors play an important role. An added value for the pitch is to coordinate the speaking part with a video support (prototype in the back sound off) so as to help people understand better the concept.
To make the most of a pitch, Guy Kawasaki, addressed a message to young entrepreneurs (like us) by developing the “10(slides)/20(minutes)/30 (font size)” pitch rule. However, this rule has been adapted to us so as to fit more with our content and needs: 7(minutes)/10(slides)/28(font size). It’s more relevant to focus on 10 specific points which are:
Next Monday we will train a first time in front of the class so as to do it as professionally as possible and be very well-prepared to do it in front of real business angels.