Had the opportunity yesterday to watch a local, informal version of a ‘Shark Tank’ – where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their start-up business plans to a panel of business-people (presumably who have launched successful start-ups – I missed the intros).  The panel provides them with advice both on how to improve their pitch to investors/mentors and improve or address gaps in their business plans. Some observations on the user-experience (UX) of the judge-panelists:

• Use the story arc to get an audience to lean in:  your protagonists are experiencing pain/a problem (make the audience feel their pain too), you have a way to resolve their pain, describe the journey they will take to get resolution and how the world looks and feels better for your protagonists when your ‘thing’ exists. Pitches that are technical, that follow a business plan outline, or that concentrate on features distract from the story. Distraction does not engage investors and mentors.  There is a time and place (and such a wonderful place it is) for the technical meanderings the likes of David Foster Wallace – this is not it.
• Extremely interesting from a psychological perspective was judges’ non-verbal reaction when entrepreneurs were over-confident. You could almost see the walls going up in the judges’ minds/emotions and they were much more harsh in their critiques. This is a tenuous connection, but it reminds me of an author (Annie Dillard perhaps? Mark Twain?) writing about the act of writing and noting that the sentence/paragraph/chapter you most cherish is ultimately the one that will have to be tossed out. The connection being, if you are absolutely confident that your business idea cannot fail and will make a resounding dent in the world, your next act is to examine its fundamental viability.
• Distribution (getting the product/service in the path of those protagonists) appears to be the most painful problem of a start-up (hence the success of Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Etsy, etc) based on the emotional intensity of the judges’ responses. Entrepreneurs must have this ‘crystallized’ (in the words of one panelist) to have any hope of a successful pitch. If the business will depend on distribution partners, they are as much protagonists in the story as customers; be just as diligent in exploring their pain and problems, their motivations and what they have at stake as the people who are your intended customers (aka: two-sided market for anyone interested in learning more). In other words, from a UX perspective, have empathy for your distributor-users too.

Finally,  although I missed the winning pitch (attending another workshop at the time), it was apparently unpolished due to the inexperience of the college-student entrepreneurs but had the judges leaning in and ultimately beat out its ‘competitors’. So to any would-be entrepreneurs whose public-speaking skills are not your strong-suit, tell your story anyway.