Entrepreneur Corner

I had the pleasure (and occasionally the pain) earlier this week of watching more than 50 companies demonstrate new products and answer questions from a panel of judges at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco. While watching I live Tweeted my reactions to every presentation from the stage. Very early on the first day I started a series of tweets where I played a game of Buzzword Bingo.

Many of the presentations were exceptional, including the eventual winner of Best Presentation iMo, in which the presenter did not speak during his presentation, but many others illustrated lessons for anyone giving a demonstration and pitch.

I am not, however, going to bash any of the presenting companies in this post (for that you will have to read back into my tweet stream) instead I’m going to cover a few of the common patterns of the weaker presentations as well as the strengths illustrated by the best demonstrations.

As I played Buzzword Bingo I flagged not just the use of overly cliched phrases or terms but also the use of cliched structures. These phrases fell into two common categories. First, there were phrases so cliched and overused as to be nearly meaningless and signal of some laziness by the presenter. Second, there were phrases that do, in fact, have meaning but often indicate that the company has hitched onto current trends and fads or are using terms they think people want to hear.

Overused phrases:

• Holy Grail
• change the rules of the game
• fix fundamental problems
• true long tail product…
• tentpole events
• value propositions
• retooled our value proposition (extra bonus round edition here)
• go from good to great (Hint: Using the title of an bestselling, old business book in your presentations is not a great idea, especially when the “great” companies highlighted in the book are mostly out-of-business.)
• low hanging fruit
• CompanyA meets CompanyB (hint tech demonstrations are not movie pitches)
• will change X forever…

Phrases with meaning but showing a focus on current fads and trends:

• Brand Equity

• SEO opportunity
• viral marketing opportunity
• monetizeable
• crowdsourcing
• differentiated business model and competitive advantage

Yes, some of the phrases seem reasonable, are perhaps phrases we use in casual conversation, but in a live demonstration to 2,000 people, a panel of judges and thousands more people watching on the live stream, not to mention the video which will be preserved for years, all of these phrases (and many, many more) should be avoided in favor of speaking plainly, clearly, and with the right level of detail about your demonstration and company.

Hollow phrases, especially mashed together into a meaningless but wordy sentence cause the audience and the judges to tune out. They also reveal a great deal about what matters and what does not matter to your team.

An example: One company on-stage shifted from product description to ways they were going to make money at least three times in one minute — one sentence about a product feature then immediately one or two more about how they would make money, in the course of about one minute discussing three different approaches. What was missing, however, from the entire presentation was any sense at all why anyone would ever start to and then continue to use the product being demonstrated.

When I found myself tweeting out about Buzzword Bingo, it was nearly always in the midst of a presentation where I could have tweeted out dozens of buzzwords. Often a single sentence would consist entirely of cliched phrases and buzzwords strung together. In fact a few buzzwords were so common that on their own I ignored them. Seemingly most companies had businesses which related to Twitter, Facebook (often Facebook Connect), real-time, and viral. If everyone is doing it, the uniqueness and value of emphasizing it during a short demonstration diminishes greatly.

I noticed many other structural cliches. Some of these were so common that TechCrunch’s Paul Carr created a Drinking Game highlighting them.

• Jokes, usually lame, about the conference organizers
• Examples using the conference organizers or judges as users (a waiver to this if they are, in fact, a customer as Tim O’Reilly was of one company presenting, though he didn’t know it)
• Using a real company as an example but noting that they are not, in fact, a customer (instead use a fictional company or, better yet, use a real customer even if they are small — real trumps fiction every day)

The best presentations, in contrast, were very focused and built on real demonstrations of the product in a way that was compelling and engaging. Often this involved showing the product in use versus describing a fictional use of the product. By avoiding cliches, the best presentations were also relaxed and comfortable for the presenters — practiced, sure, but not so practiced or polished as to hide the passion and drive of the founders.

[photo:flickr/klynslis]

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