With the right pitch, you can sell an idea in 4-minutes.

Honestly, on Friday night I wasn’t too enthusiastic about spending a weekend “locked” in a room with eight strangers to come up with a ‘start-up’ company. But, after listening to the 60-second pitches, the buzz of energy from the 100+ people who turned up, and the persistent and friendly Scottish brain behind the idea that interested me, I decided to give up 54 hours and a bit of sleep to get a crash course on building a business.

While there was a huge demand on all sorts of people with different skills (i.e. marketing, strategy, HR, communications, web developers, programmers, etc.), what we realized was it was all about the “idea” and how well we thought it through… basically to convince the jury and audience that our business ideas was worth an investment. We spent all weekend refining what we thought was a  good idea to something to the point and valuable to a customer. Did I mention that we only had 4 minutes on Sunday to explain this idea to them?

Roughly 40 ideas were pitched on Friday night, with 15 of these eventually getting “developed” by Sunday. Finding out the “pain”  – what it is, who has it, and the solution for it – was one of the hardest things to do. Focused, targeted and measurable – any business idea is possible taking these three things into account… it doesn’t sound as easy as it seems.  In the end, StartUp Weekend Geneva was all about selling and presenting an idea and inspiring potential investors to throw money/resources at the idea… don’t ever underestimate the power of sales and communication to get your point across.

It’s kinda the same thing with information… we’re producing so much of it these days that if we really want to get our message across, it has to be sorted, organized, and put together in a way that makes sense. Not only do we need to understand the information, the people we want to communicate to and what kind of impact we want, we also need to communicate it in a way that gets the point across, otherwise it’s just a lot of wasted energy.

Difficult is easy, simple is hard… we eventually didn’t reach the finals, but the group we formed really sees the potential in the project and we’re looking to continue working on it – I’ll keep the idea a bit of mystery for now!