Blog | The Pitch

Just like everyone else, I have ideas, not a lot but a few come to my mind a week. I'm always on the go, talking with folks and running an accelerator program in Norfolk called Hatch. So, I don't have a lot of time to sit down and think of.

I was gearing up for a long weekend a few weeks ago, my best friend from college was coming to town, my girlfriend was out of town and I was hosting a college hackfest at Hatch.  

After wrapping up my day, I headed home to pick up a few things for the night. Around the time I arrived home, I received an email from a potential startup into Hatch, looking for advice on their idea. I generally respond to anyone who asks for feedback, because I genuinely care about them and they success or failure of their business. 

What annoyed me about the email, was that this startup said all we need is 1 million dollars to be successful. And after seeing enough of these, I know that money isn't what is driving their company, its the passion, smart, hard work and getting a little lucky. Execution. 

So, I thought, "What if there was a tool for folks with business ideas to get realtime feedback from a community of others on their business ideas."

I googled, "How to get my business plan read". I knew about Angel List and use it often and of course any service provider would be competition as well, but what about the stage even before that. The stage where your idea is at inception, how can you vet that, before doing anything else. 

I emailed by buddy Tim Ryan, and asked him to take a look. That was February 22. The key to me, was to keep it stupid simple. Why? Because too many platforms complicate things. 

At the bar later that night, I pitched it to one of the Hatch investors, who just so happens to be a developer as well.

Me: "So you have an idea, but you can't get feedback on it. I want to guid a platform that the community gives those with ideas feedback. And the person who pitches has to pay 5 bucks."

Erik: " Love it, I'll build it."

Seriously, the idea is that simple, that people can understand it. When "pitching" your idea, make it as easy for anyone to understand. If you don't the barrier to understand grows. 

The next morning, I brought in one of my designers to handle some of the UI. Erik and I exchanged some texts and came up with ThePitch.co, bought the domain and setup the Launchrock landing page. 

Started pitching to friends and other startup founders. 

"Phase I 

People can post their pitches on our site for $5. Others can +1 or -1 the idea for free and leave comments (those get rated too). A user gets a "reputation" based on the ratings of their idea and comments.  Pitches can be tagged by industry, technology, etc. (think StackOverflow ex: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105372/how-do-i-enumerate-an-enum)."

Login via FB and twitter. Make it easy to share pitches on social networks.(We ended up ditching the social logins, thanks to a MailChimp post)

I then did some pre-vetting of my own, got on reddit asked some questions about would you pitch and pay to a network, the overall answer was, "yes, and what would make it better is if it was a closed network"

Initial coding started March 6 and the week of march 10, Erik took the week off from his day job and we worked side-by-side to get launched. Features got developed quickly and Erik wanted to build more. As the guy who runs and accelerator and used to manage dozens of other startups, I have seen a lot of startups jump to quick. My answer was always simple, no more features, let's see what the users want. I have to practice what I preach right?

Signups before launch were small, but solid. We have 21 signups from the launch rock page with marketing only through Twitter and Facebook. 

We decided to launch Sunday March 17 around 3 pm, we can call it a soft launch. I pushed out the email about the launch the next morning. 

Conversions: 

1st email sent(closed beta)- 66% open rate 

2nd email(we're live)- lower- 28.6% open rate, not sure why, but could be due to those saw it on facebook and twitter and knew we launched

Day 1: We have 31 registered users and 20 pitches! We also had 21 comments, 27 pitch votes, and 4 comment votes. 3 paid users, we made 15 bucks our first day!

Marketing: Email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Twitter 40 followers 40 following

couple tweets a day, engaged heavy twitter followers

FB: 47 Likes 16 talking about it

LinkedIn: Shared in a couple of groups, few comments, few feature requests

I also got lucky, the week before launch, I reached out to our local NPR show and asked if we could do a show on Start Norfolk, the weekend long startup competition I organize. We had it scheduled for Monday, same day as Launch. Awesome!

Erik, was smart enough to think ahead and created coupon code, "I Love Cathy", the hosts name. Seconds before we went on air, she says, what's this The Pitch thing you started. I told her and she loved it. I was going to bring it up somehow in the show, but instead she did. She loved that we had a code ready for her. "5 bucks to save you hassle is a steal" she said. 

At the end of the day, there's a lot of work that goes into launching a product. What you have to remember is keep it simple, study what your users do and ask for before you build your next feature. 

We have an icebox of a few features, but are sitting on them until we get enough feedback that users want that or not. 

Stay Simple.