the grandmother test

Hey there,

Welcome to the new people on the list - as a reminder, I am Dragos from Project Arrow, where we guide founders with what to do and who to talk to in order to get funded and accelerate their startups.

Today we’re talking about making your pitch story as simple as possible

Yesterday I worked with a group of college students, helping them with their startup pitches and mentoring on the way to building solid projects.

There were two common themes that stood out with our discussions.

1. What do you want to be remembered by?

The amount of work and details when building a startup is staggering. When you meet a customer, or an investor for that matter, you simply cannot convey everything you work on in a simple 5-10 minutes discussion. You’re better off to talk about the essentials.

To boil the essential down, when you prepare your story, or elevator pitch for that matter, it’d be useful if you settle for 3-5 things you want your startup to be remembered by. Those can be an innovative way of going to market, or a smart feature that differentiates your product in the market, or a KPI, or a lesser known insight about your market. Whatever stands out from the work that you do - list as many as possible and make a top 5. They should be the starting point, build your story top down from those points.

When you’re done with the pitch, simply check if those 3-5 things stand out and are easily conveyed through the entire story telling. Those should be part of the ‘Oh, I remember that guy with the <insert remarkable thing> startup, pretty cool!’

2. The grandmother test.

When building stuff you tend to live in a bubble that’s centered around your business. It can easily get very technical and less understood by people outside that bubble. What seems trivial and common sense to you and your peers, it may sound like foreign languages to outsiders.

That is why, also when crafting your pitch story, you need to make sure you use simple words and common language that actually make sense to ordinary people, those who have no idea what a TAM, or a go to market, or a KPI means, for example.

I call this the grandmother test - do your pitch so easy to understand that even your grandmother can get it. If you achieve this level of simplicity, the sales process becomes much simpler - for customers, for people you want to hire, or for investors you want in your business.

Does your elevator pitch stand the grandmother test? Hit reply and send it over, and I will give you feedback on it.

And don’t forget that we do this kind of work on weekly basis at Project Arrow. Give it a try.

Community

Learn from other founders
Is it difficult to raise money? How long did it take? What milestones does my startup have to meet? What do investors have to understand about my company?

We interviewed founders and investors involved in successful VC rounds at very early stages of their startups. Here’s what they had to say.

Startups recently seeded
If you want a full list of interesting startup raises from all over Europe, you can go check Monday CET. Below a selection of the more interesting ones:

🇬🇧 Boldr - consumer devices used for effective smart heating and cooling. (London)
🇸🇪 Calda - physics-based AI engines to model and optimise heavy industrial processes (Stockholm)
🇫🇷 Cognitive Design Systems - product design platform used to generate designs and manufacturing optimization solutions using AI (Toulouse)
🇩🇪 Ellipsus - collaborative writing tool (Berlin)
🇩🇰 ID Sure - digital certificate solution helping training institutes with subscription-based products (Copenhagen)

Did you just raise funding for your startup? Hit reply and we’ll feature it here.

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