Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Pitching a Product Idea for Venture Capital

Greetings from the Finkle Lecture Theater at the Australian National University in Canberra, where ANU and University of Canberra students are pitching their ideas for the Innovation ACT competition. Each team gets two minutes to pitch their idea to a panel of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and researchers. The same questions come up: who is the customer?why would a young person pay for this? hasn't this been done before? how much will you charge? how much are people willing to pay?

When listening to dozens of pitches, one after another, they can all start to sound the same. Many this year are web based services (not as many smart phone based as I was expecting). Many are for providing services, such as food, to students.

While this is just a student competition, there are $25,000 in prizes.

The team I am mentoring is code named "Altair" and is working on a tablet planner application. Noting the interest in food by other teams, I have suggested they program the system to find events at the university with food and booking me in so I can eat free for a week. ;-)

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