Critical Analysis of Nightly Pitch Presentation

For the Venture Culture module I aim to develop an application that allows students/business to find/advertise events. With this I have previously had to pitch my idea in front of the class, not once but twice. The initial pitch was intended to be a short 2-minute presentation explaining the basics of my idea. I then went away and refined my idea, coming back to do a 5-minute presentation which contained slideshow visuals to aid my thoughts.

To start I would like to address the negative points of the 2-minute presentation. I have only watched this presentation twice, which straight away shows that I am not confident with what I had presented across in the first place. If you have watched the video on my blog, you will notice that it exceeds the 2-minute mark… it is actually double that. This is entirely upon the fault of myself for not practicing or timing the presentation whatsoever; I was intending to go up there and speak from memory, where I had only read the presentation out mentally.

When the push came to shove and I went to present my nervousness took control and actually made me forget everything I had planned to say! Luckily for me I had written down some trigger points which I took up to present with, giving me a fallback option if I forgot what to talk about.

I am unsure as to whether I portrayed my idea across to the class effectively from this pitch, mainly due to the amount of questions (there are 8 minutes of questions in total, twice my pitch length!). It is difficult to know as I was pitching to my potential market, so the students were either really interested and wanted to know more, or were being polite and getting me to fill in the gaps where I had missed out on core information.

After listening through to the ideas that I have pitched initially, a lot has changed. First off I am trying to veer away from being ‘locked’ towards students, and relying less on businesses to advertise Nightly.

But it wasn’t all bad! A lot of the time I was identifying a problem with the market, and then finding a way to address and find a solution. I actually began by stating my method of how I came up with the idea, which I also took on to use in my second presentation.

This takes me onto that second pitch now, which in my opinion I almost took too critically my self-feedback from the first pitch. I was worried I was going to seriously over-run on the pitch again (this one was meant to be 5-minutes, so I kept trimming and refining my information only giving out info that was relevant. Don’t really know how it was possible to go from 4-minutes initially to just over 3-minutes in the second pitch but I achieved it.

I am very sad about how the visuals came out. A lot of time was spent refining and presenting the information whilst also following the branding guidelines, which I had really worked hard on.  The projector/lighting in the room was rather poor which made the orange on black from my presentation come out very faintly. The good thing is I noticed this an hour BEFORE the lecture started, which gave me last minute tinkering time to make lines/text more bold, allowing more visibility of the content.

In the video the pitch was cut short by camera issues, so I cannot criticise too many of the questions. There were several more questions after the video ended, and were all very simple answers that I think I should have included as content in my presentation.

One thing I have noticed in both videos is my body language. In the first pitch I relied to heavily on the support of my notes in my hand, which by holding something really shown how nervous I was. In the second pitch I decided it was best to have the notes on the projection, taking away focus from me to the wall behind me.

A lot of arm flailing happened in both videos whilst I tried to get across my idea, which in a way helped, as I don’t think I went too overboard with it. BUT, during the questions and answers period afterwards, I immediately cross my arms and almost lock myself shut, being very defensive about my idea and hoping no one was going to kill my baby.

So to wrap things up, I have discovered and learnt several important lessons from performing these product pitches. First, I need to stop being so nervous. Everybody in the same room was under the same pressure and each and every one of us handled it completely differently. Whether it is from almost dancing on the spot to clicking fingers manically, we all had our pros and cons.

Secondly I think I learnt mainly from others how to present and not present ideas. If I were to go back and do things again I would definitely take the pitch a lot more seriously in the planning stages. You have to think more about the audience you are pitching it to, if it is the customer tell them their benefits, rather than bore them with information they don’t need; and vice versa.

Overall I am very happy, as I have managed to form a team with other members of the module group; so they are happy enough with my idea to take it on forward! If there is one thing that I have learnt, it is that if you really believe in something, you can make it happen.