Free Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat

let alone if you finished. You can let the other attendees know where you're from or other personal details—but only if they're relevant, or if you think they'll somehow warm up the audience.
    You want to get to your main point as quickly as possible. The most important part of the pitch is explaining the problem and making people understand the pain-point . We recall one guy who got up and explained that he recently bought a present for his girlfriend's birthday. It cost a lot of money and when he presented it to her, he said, “She looked at me like I had kicked a puppy.” Suffice it to say, she wasn't thrilled with the item he had chosen. His idea was to create a website that would help men buy gifts for the women in their life, and it was an easy sell after the audience heard that story. Which man in the room didn't have that experience? They would all want to check out “Manshopper.”
    Another entrepreneur wondered aloud about the annoyance of conference calls: Who hasn't had the experience of either forgetting about a conference call or waiting endlessly on one for the other people to join? Whether you're the responsible party or the irresponsible one, the process is irritating. The person presenting a solution for this problem imitated the automated monotone voice that repeatedly requests the six-number code and announces the number of people on the conference call. When he went on to suggest that he could offer a way for your phone to ring when it was time for the call to begin, he had everyone in the room hooked.
    When you think about explaining the problem, whether it's to an audience or an investor or your spouse, you should be thinking in terms of problems. Something out there is lacking. People who want to be connected are not being connected. People are unhappy with a service that is already being provided to them, or they can't figure out how to find something better.
    It can be something serious, like noting that many individuals are willing to provide shelter to disaster victims while the victims and the larger shelter providers can't find one another. That's what the founder of Sparkrelief explained when he came to Startup Weekend in Denver, Colorado, in October 2010. He had been displaced by wildfires in California and was hoping to help others who had been put in the same position. Today, Sparkrelief “empowers communities and organizations to quickly share accurate information and provide relief during a disaster.” The group has been written up in Time magazine, received contributions from around the globe, and helped victims of the 2011 earthquakes and tsunami in Japan.
    Don't worry, though. You can also pitch a problem that's a little more trivial. Like this one: Don't you love watching TV with your friends? How can you do it when they're not in your living room with you? With an Internet-TV application that offers video chat while you're watching, of course.
    Deliver a Solution with One Sentence
    So what about the solution? You should be able to summarize it in one sentence. Ignore, for a minute, all of the cool features you'd like to add and focus instead on the core product. How does it solve the problem you've presented? If you've done a good job of explaining the problem, the explanation of the solution should flow naturally.
    Now is the time in your pitch to brand your product. Make up a name for your company. Even if it's not the one you will stick with in the end, it's important to leave people with a name to remember. When participants finish their 60 seconds without mentioning a name, we'll usually ask them to come up with one on the spot as they are walking away. Since the audience will be listening to pitch after pitch after pitch, you need to give them something to hang on to and set you apart from the crowd.
    Angel investors and venture capitalists may not have 50 or