We can’t resist the opportunity to give another shout out to the twelve companies who presented at our third First Look Forum event yesterday, and the whole community of folks who made it possible! Both John Cook of TechFlash and Greg Huang of xconomy did some incredibly thorough write-ups of the afternoon showcase, so we’ll just chime in with some context around the program itself.

What is this event anyway? The forum itself is the end of a two-month application, screening and coaching program, but we hope just the beginning of a new path for these diverse companies!  Our twelve participants receive mentoring from a pair of coaches (primarily investors, with a sprinkling of serial entrepreneurs), a presentation workshop, and a personal coaching session from Pivotal Presentations.  The “piano recital” at the end is a great place to meet potential investors and advisors, but past participants have raved equally about the coaching and the big day.

What do these companies have in common? Our theme is innovation. It’s not all IT or Web 2.0 all the time. Remember this event is brought to you by the organization that featured the founders of Bacon Salt as keynoters in our signature Entrepreneur University!  Every company selected to present in First Look Forum had a unique value proposition and was at an inflection point in their business:

1. a local business, profitable going concern for 8 years, changing the game and going national
2. a travel-oriented company re-emerging from hibernation and hoping to take the industry by storm
3. a graduate of the Founder’s Institute embarking on the fund-raising adventure
4. a grant recipient and perennial UW business plan competition participant who met their first investor at FLF!   (scroll down for their identities!)

What else? None of these companies had done the dog-and-pony show to the membership of an organized angel group, nor received venture funding, so First Look Forum was their coming-out party.  Are these companies ready for investment?  Many will be in the next 6-12 months. This may explain how we can attract investors from some 20 investment groups, including: Alliance of Angels, OVP, Seraph, The Tacoma Angel Network, Founders Co-op, Divergent Ventures, Ignition Partners, WRF Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Voyager Capital, Integra Ventures, Puget Sound Venture Club, Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society and more.  In addition to serving entrepreneurs with coaching and connections, we provide a service to the investment community in sourcing early deals for their organizations.

The flip side of the coin of having ’something for everyone’ is that not every pitch will resonate with every investor.  We support innovative entrepreneurs of every ilk and are happy to showcase the many local flavors!  The home of Microsoft, Amazon, Real Networks and Expedia has also enjoyed decades of innovation from Boeing and Starbucks… NWEN members reflect this unique potpourri.

What did we take away from the big day?

• Always be closing: We believe every one of these companies had “steak” (one, literally ground into dogfood and frozen)….but the audience voted with their coins for some of the pitches that really “sizzled.”
• Investors will vote with their feet. From my time with the Alliance of Angels, whether a company is in materials science or software, deals get done when they have that needle-in-the-haystack advocate who steps up to lead.  Being genetically pre-disposed towards match-making (yes, I’m a yenta), it was incredibly fulfilling to see investors huddling with presenters in corners of the room during our reception.   Successful entrepreneurs create their own luck, but we can help them get lucky by bringing together a diverse set of investors and deals, adding a healthy dash of showmanship and a soupcon of alcohol.

Answer key below. Congratulations to all the presenters, finalists, runner-up and grand-prize winner, and thanks to the entire community of volunteers, coaches, and investors for supporting the area’s innovators!

1. Darwin’s Natural Pet Products
2. Inside Trip
   
3. Zendorse
4. Empowering Engineering Technologies
   

You already know the elevator pitch is critical to your business, not just for pitching but to crystallize the goals of the company in your own mind.

You might also have developed a one-line positioning statement — a single sentence that defines the company in a simple, clear, sentence.  Not one you’d use on customers, but rather something to tack on your wall, something that all marketing and communication should be working towards.

The Venture Hacks blog teaches us about something even smaller and tighter — the high-concept pitch. The idea is to boil your message down to a short phrase that references existing, successful products. Examples:

• “YouTube is Flickr for video.”
• “LinkedIn is Facebook for business.”
• “Twitter is Blogger for Attention Deficit Disorder.”

I like brevity, but I don’t like the high-concept pitch. It leaves out so much it becomes ambiguous, possibly with unintended consequences.

Let’s make this concrete. Say I’ve invented a new compact, portable projector:

This projector weighs less than a pound and it’s the size of a cell phone. It uses bright LEDs so you never blow out a $100 bulb. Your sales guys don’t have to haul equipment or plug into projectors missing “yellow” that can’t run at their laptop’s resolution. This projector works 100% of the time and is small enough to get through airport security in your jacket pocket.

That’s my product pitch — contains all the details and reasons to buy it. Now for the positioning statement:

A compact, portable, rugged projector that eliminates surprise problems on the road.

Short and sweet, still including the primary features and benefits.

Now it’s time for the high-concept pitch. Here’s an idea, copied almost exactly from the Venture Hacks article:

iPhone for projectors

This sounds good at first blush. iPhones are known for being easy to use, pretty, coveted, and commercially successful. Also the analogy extends to size and portability. Good!

But these aren’t the only attributes of the iPhone. iPhones have a reputation of not working well with Microsoft Office, something particularly troubling for the travelling salesman. Readers of this blog are likely to use GMail and Open Office, but your typical salesman is on a strict diet of PowerPoint and Outlook. Just yesterday I spoke with a business traveler who has avoided the iPhone specifically because of its lack of integration with Exchange (now fixed).

iPhones are notoriously inflexible and not customizable. They bucket you in a culture. With the v2.0 software debacle, I could even include “buggy.”

When you use only three words and when you invoke something well-known and complicated, it’s not clear what message will be received. I’m brevity’s biggest fan, but there’s such a thing as “too brief.”

No, I’ll stick with Eric Sink’s definition of positioning statement as the fundamental particle in my marketing universe.

P.S. Another weird quote from that article is that “for investors, the product is nothing.” I get the point — that product != strategy, and product strategy is more interesting to investors than feature bullets. But still… “is nothing?” Perhaps intentionally exaggerated to make a point, but if you find an investor for whom this is literally true (and I have!), steer clear. Strategy with zero product understanding isn’t strategy.

P.P.S. Healthy disagreements notwithstanding, Venture Hacks is a must-read if you’re interested in funding or selling a company.

P.P.P.S. Someone should make that projector!

Jason Cohen wrote this post and allowed us to syndicate it. He is the founder of Smart Bear Software, maker of Code Collaborator, the world’s most popular tool for peer code review and recent winner of the Jolt Award.

What if tomorrow I forced you to double your price?

If you sell software, your prices just doubled. If you’re an hourly consultant, your rate just doubled. If you’re a salaried employee, you’re now demanding double your salary.

Ignoring the (understandable) backlash from your existing customers/employer, what would you have to do to justify the new price tag?

• If you’re selling software, would it be best to add new features, or would people perceive more value if it were beautifully designed? Does it need more functionality or fewer bugs? If a customer emails tech support, what response would impress the customer? If a customer comes to you with twenty feature requests, do they get lost in the shuffle or do you proactively contact them quarterly with updates?
• If you’re a consultant, could you command a higher rate if you got certified in some technology, or would you earn more authority writing a quality blog? Should you charge for every email or provide some advice gratis? Should you charge a low rate but milk projects for extra hours or should you be expensive but brutally honest with your time reporting? To maintain contact with your past customers, is it enough to send automated holiday e-cards or should you write a quarterly newsletter with useful tips and ideas?
• If you’re an employee, how could you make yourself indispensable? Is there a project lying around that no one else is taking the initiative on? Is there a way to save money? Is there something you could do above and beyond your job description that would undeniably improve the company?
• If you’re looking for work, should your résumé list as many technologies as possible or should you boast about your deep expertise in one area? Should you dwell on formatting or on making an impression? Should you copy the ten recommendations you have on LinkedIn or is it best to attach one passionate, glowing recommendation? Is it more impressive to list your club memberships or your Stackoverflow reputation?

Assuming this thought experiment has provoked some ideas for how you’d change your approach to business or your professional behavior…

What would happen if you acted like that without raising your price?

You’d crush your competition.  Maybe it’s the edge you need to make sales during a recession.  Or maybe you could justify raising your price!

Hold on though, isn’t it more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to behave as if your time is twice as valuable?

Yes.

But then, behaving that way does make you twice as valuable!

Jason Cohen wrote this post and allowed us to syndicate it. He is the founder of Smart Bear Software, maker of Code Collaborator, the world’s most popular tool for peer code review and recent winner of the Jolt Award.

A business plan, an elevator pitch, a pitch deck — the number of different things you have to have to successfully pitch your company is amazing. Now add in the one pager. Whether you call it that or an executive summary or a company overview, it’s an essential part of the whole story. Like the one-page resume, you want a single, concise one-page document that you can hand to potential investors and business partners. There are lots of advantages to having it be a single page, but I’m only going to mention the most important one — investors expect it.

To create my one pager, I started with my five-page business plan. I went through and highlighted all the most important stuff, then consolidated that in a new document which ended up about two pages long. Then I started looking for things to trim. I was pretty close to finished when I decided that I should make sure what I was doing was consistent with what I needed to submit to another competition, the Willamette Angel Conference (although I’ll be at a disadvantage because Groupthink isn’t an Oregon company, I figure the extra connections will be worth it). It was at that point that I realized I’d made a mistake. The Willamette Angel Conference uses Angelsoft, and the whole way it works is different — your one pager gets created by filling in a form on the site. Here are the items you’re asked for:

• One line pitch
• Summarize your business
• What specifically makes your management team most qualified to build this business?
• Define customer problem
• Describe the solution you sell
• Define your market
• List your current or potential customers
• Sales and marketing strategy
• Describe your business model
• Describe the competitive landscape and list your competitors
• Define your competitive advantage and list barriers to entry

Each of these items also has a longer explanation you see as you’re filling out the form. For example, the explanation for “Define customer problem” reads: Investors fund pain killers, not vitamin pills. What critical customer need does your company address? If you are a web company, you may need to make a hard decision here on whether to talk about your audience or the people who will ultimately pay you (like your advertisers). You only get 210 characters to answer that one. When you’re done, Angelsoft turns your information into a one page summary that looks like this sample:

At first, I was thrown for a loop, but then I realized that this was a much better way to do it. After all, investors looking at your one pager have a bunch of questions in their head that the’ll use to decide if they want to read anymore. If you don’t answer those questions, it’s over. So the number one task really should be to make sure you answer those questions!

In the process of answering the questions, I managed to get in every one of my key points and pretty much nothing extraneous, but the document wasn’t exactly what I wanted to best represent the company. For Angelsoft applications, I have to take what I get, but that’s not true for NWEN or other investors. So, after I finished up the Angelsoft process, I took all the information and created a new document that I could edit. Then I made a few changes:

• Combined the one line pitch, business summary, and customer problem into a new opening section which read better than the three individual sections.
• Combined target market and customers sections.
• Combined competitors and competitive advantage sections.
• Added a little bit of additional detail in a few places where I’d been constrained by Angelsoft’s character limits.
• Added a (small) illustration to help explain the product.

In each of the cases, I made the change to improve readability or punch. But, overall, it’s a lot like the one pager from Angelsoft. You don’t have to do your one pager like I did and your executive summary might be longer. Garage.com recommends two to three pages in this excellent article. But, whatever you do, keep these things in mind:

• The purpose is to sell your company to investors, not tell them everything about it
• You want to convey the excitement and the energy behind your business
• To the extent that you can, answer the questions potential investors will have before they ask them

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

I’ve gotten a lot of advice on my slide deck for the NWEN First Look Forum competition. So much advice, in fact, that I followed it too well.

The first versions of my business plan and my pitch deck were so focused on the product, the technology, and all the cool things that we’re doing for customers, that I neglected to talk enough about the business. I talked about how the technology scaled, but not how the business scaled. As one of my advisors said, investors will assume your technology will scale — they want to know how the company can grow to be a billion dollar business. And I’d made the same mistake in other areas. The pitch deck (and the pitch that goes with it), initially had a lot less about the business side of the business than the business plan, so, off I went, removing technical stuff, and fleshing out the business side. It was looking pretty good.

Then, I went to my first coaching session with my NWEN advisors. We went through the whole deck and they gave me a lot of great feedback. When we were done, they asked a few questions, including a key one — what’s exciting about this? When I explained what I thought was exciting, they both responded, practically in unison, why isn’t that in the pitch? It turns out that I had over-corrected, by a long shot. I had spent so much time working on my weaknesses that I had given my strengths short shrift. I wanted to make sure that everybody knew the business was solid, that I had basically left out what was exciting about the business in the first place.

In the final deck, I lead with the big vision and the long-term plan that is a key part of the excitement, then I segue to the first product and the customer pain that it’s all about. The pain is a bit less exciting, but it’s compelling. Elsewhere in the deck, I make sure to revisit the things about the business that I think make it really exciting. And, I try to talk about technology only where it directly relates to customer pain, solutions, or growth. The result is a significantly better pitch.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

Who is more likely to produce long-term shareholder value — the entrepreneur who raises too much investment capital, or the entrepreneur who funds growth through profits alone?

First time entrepreneurs often have skewed visions of “how it all works”. Their perceptions are often shaped by the numerous successes that get touted about the media, rather than by the 1000-fold number of failures. It makes the “accidental success” of YouTube appear reachable, or at least “just as likely” as any other startup.

One of the things that entrepreneurs usually believe is that once they have an idea, they need investment — that’s just how it works, right? Once they start to talk to investors though, as well as advisors and other folks in the startup community, the questions usually come up … is this a lifestyle business or a “swing for the fences” big market opportunity? A “lifestyle business” is one which you intend to keep running for a decade or two — like my Dad’s optometry practice, for instance, or my brother’s event audio/visual recording business — typically an owner-managed business in which the profits are used solely to support the ongoing lifestyle of the proprietor.

Then there are the “swing for the fences” big market opportunities. These are the startups with big goals, where the entrepreneurs focus on a market opportunity >$100M. To get there, most companies on this track sell ownership in their company at some stage of their business to raise the capital necessary to build their company. Some companies even raise huge amounts of venture capital, at a hefty dilution mind you, before they even arguably HAVE a business. (Twitter comes to mind …) Investors are compelled by visions of a healthy return on their investment, and in the latter case also by extremely savvy entrepreneurs.

For whatever reason, I’m NOT a “lifestyle business” kinda guy. I’m only interested in building a company with a compelling market value and resulting shareholder ROI, but as a founder I’m ALSO uninterested in immediate dilution down to single digit % ownership. I want as much equity in the company as possible.

I learned long ago that the best way to build personal wealth and shareholder value is through “bootstrapping”. Bootstrapping is the art of building companies with very little outside capital/investment. I’m proud of my bootstrapping skills actually, which I’ve developed over four startups now, yet I’ve also realized that outside capital is also essential to developing/realizing a substantial market opportunity.

The reality is that there is a middle ground. Bootstrapping your way 100% to IPO, while honorable, is very difficult and uncommon. If the market opportunity is truly there, being under-capitalized will usually result in missing the market window of opportunity. Conversely, raising too much capital too early rarely results in long-term shareholder value. In other words, given a large market opportunity — a startup that raises too much investment capital is just as likely to fail (to generate shareholder value) as a startup that doesn’t take any investment capital.

I’ve been building Others Online based on what I thought to be an appropriate balance of equity financing and bootstrapping (”sweat equity” financing). Unfortunately we’re still not profitable and thus reliant on investment capital at a time when the market opportunity is large and we’re landing large customers, but market conditions are unstable and investment capital has dried up. And the other day I was talking to one of my investors, who literally wrote the book on bootstrapping, about our status as a company. He insisted that there “has to be a way” to generate more cash from our pipeline immediately. The only way I can see to do that is to shift our business model in the short-term, and I worry that doing so may negatively impact our ability to achieve the “big market opportunity”.

I keep thinking about this. Is it possible to “swing for the fences” (big market opportunity) at the same time as focusing on 1st base (getting to cash flow breakeven)? Or are the two incompatible? I suppose it depends on the market opportunity, but I’d argue most high-value windows of opportunity in the market are open for a limited period of time. Rarely do you not have competition eyeballing the same opportunity, and sufficient funding is generally a prerequisite to nailing these windows of opportunity.

Market leadership positions are always attained as a result of execution. Financing is not execution. However, financing provides the means to develop the necessary components to execution: team, timing, marketing, and product development. Since paths to success are rarely a straight line, financing also helps recovery from bad decisions (on any of the above). Under-capitalized companies are therefore at greater risk. That said, bootstrapping is also essential. It teaches you to make your mistakes quickly and therefore least costly. Bootstrapping is good execution.

2009 is going to be a difficult time for companies who are “swinging for the fences” but aren’t financed for the next 12-18 months.  If you’re one of them, like we are, it seems you can only either change your game plan and just focus on 1st base, or merge your team with a team in a far better position to hit the home run.

Jordan Mitchell, the author of this post, blogs regularly and is the CEO/Founder of Others Online (his 4th Internet startup), which provides ad networks with behavioral profiling and targeting solutions.

After a fun-filled, beer-fueled, internet-disabled afternoon topped off with thai food and a test-drive of Danielle’s techkaraoke concept, I put together the following Stephen Colbert-style takeaways from Seattle Startup Weekend part Deux. Hats off to the event organizers for gathering such a committed and talented group of people for a marathon of a weekend.  Noting my own personal disappointment that Raising John Stamos was 86′ed, that I don’t have an iPhone, and that evidently twitter is the ringtone of 2009 when it comes to spawning startups, I enjoyed my 6-hour drive-by of the 54-hour event.

• Tip of the hat: Eating your own dogfood. When it comes to creating value in the marketplace, you have to ask yourself if “the dog will eat the dogfood.”  The most compelling elevator pitches I heard Saturday afternoon were delivered by passionate team members who represented their own target market– or who could clearly articulate the company’s benefits from the perspective of their customers. Internal consistency is also a good thing– walking the walk of your value proposition. If you’re starting a green company and drive away in a Humvee, or represent a branding company with a lackluster presentation, your street cred is shot.

• Tip: Show vs. tell. If you can capture your audience’s attention and imagination with an engaging before-and-after scenario, that tends to be much more effective than delivering a lecture on features and benefits.  Slight cautionary tale (not a wag-worthy offense):  one brand marketing company put together a text-heavy presentation explaining their value proposition, but what was truly compelling was the imagery of a client’s website before they engaged the firm, and the subsequent reimagining of the site afterwards (also see: dogfood discussion above).

• Tip: Be flexible. One common element of a nonprofit organization and a startup is that the vision and mission gets you out of bed every morning and keeps you up at night. It is absolutely critical to your success that you passionately believe in your mission, but you cannot become so obsessed by your own vision that you ignore what the market wants.  One of the greatest attributes of a startup is the ability to be nimble and turn on a dime; some of the best commentary I heard from the Startup marathoners was how much their ideas evolved over the course of the weekend. The 150+ participants were the microcosm of the marketplace, and the savvy companies listened to this proxy for the market.

• Wag of the finger: The chicken-egg dilemma. I spoke with more than a handful of Startuppers whose companies were predicated on user-generated content. One of the challenges they face is that to get content, they need users, but to keep users, they need content (no site visitor in their right mind would likely return should they seek content and find nothing).  This need not be the death-knell of the startup; founders need to think creatively about how to seed their site with content before they’re ready for prime time user acquisition.  Some combination of partnerships and licensing data can help create customer stickiness.  Check out CultureMob for just one example– this site is designed to to help users “discover, share and promote events.”  As the CultureMob team goes to market in each new geography, they launch with pre-populated data from publications and venues, and the experience is further enriched with user-generated content.

• Wag: The fumpany. A term coined by my former colleague Kevin Kirn, this describes the age-old “it’s a feature not a company” concern.  You just may be a fumpany if you’re constantly getting asked “why doesn’t facebook/ twitter/ sharepoint/ insert-company-name-here just add that enhancement themselves?”

Thanks again to John Smilgin, Nathan Kaiser and the gang for inviting me to crash the party.  Already looking forward to Seattle Startup the Third.

Full disclosure: Rebecca Lovell, Executive Director of NWEN, has a deep and abiding love for John Stamos.  For those nonbelievers, check out the actor’s star turn on General Hospital as Blackie Parrish.  No one puts Blackie in the corner.

It’s 4AM and I just sent out copies of my 5-page business plan for the Northwest Entrepreneurs’ Network’s First Look Forum to a bunch of advisors, plus a few extra people who I haven’t previously solicited advice from. It’s so easy to wait to finish something until right before the deadline, so I deliberately set my own deadline three days early so I’d be able to get some feedback before I have to submit it.

If you’re still working on your own plan, here are some thoughts from my process:

• I’ve been pitching my business concept and long-term vision to people for months now, but where does that go? Strictly speaking, it’s not an answer to any of the five questions they’re asking. I ended up putting parts of it in each of the first three sections (Market/Opportunity, Novelty/Concept, and Scalability of the Business Model).
• Similarly, in discussions with people, a decent amount of technology has been discussed — what I’m using, why, what’s good about it, what were the alternatives, etc. Almost none of that made it into the document. Investors want confidence that you’ll make the right technical decisions. They don’t need details on those decisions.
• The addressable market, funding needs, sales projections — if I was a business person, these probably would have been trivial. I think I did a reasonable job and, in this document, a lot of detail isn’t required.
• Competitors — there’s an often discussed trap of saying you have no competitors. It’s like a catch-22, though. If you have exact competitors, you probably don’t have a viable business. I pointed out competitors and how none of them are doing exactly what Groupthink is. I did not have room for one of those market charts, but, when I do one, I’m thinking of putting Groupthink in the middle — Papa Bear’s on one side, Mama Bear’s on the other side, and Groupthink is in the middle, just right.
• Scalability — don’t confuse scalable technology with a scalable business. I wrote about both.
• The Team — gee, it’s just me right now. I wrote about both my own skills and experience as well as my search for a CEO.
• Even if you’re not applying to the First Look Forum, this is a great exercise. I put a lot of stuff down on paper that I’ve been saying over and over again. Now I have the opportunity to really refine it.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the version I sent out, but I also fully expect that I’ll be making major surgery on it once I get some feedback. And, of course, when I wake up, I’ll have at least half a dozen things I’ve realized on my own while I slept. I predict I’ll be busy until Friday.

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

A while back, when I was working on a business plan for a potential startup, I met up with someone who was also working on a business plan. He was a marketing guy, with limited technology knowledge, so it seemed that we could help each other. His business plan was gorgeous and read well, and it had all the right revenue projections and graphs. Now I’m no slouch as a writer, but mine was dreadful. My plan had accurate descriptions and diagrams of the architecture of the system that I planned to build, and I had a working prototype to go with it. And his plan? He also had some architecture diagrams, but they were basically fiction. I pointed that out to him, but he said it didn’t matter — they were just placeholders and investors wouldn’t care. Guess which company got funding?

I’m not saying that technology people like myself are dismissed entirely, but it’s certainly a much easier road for people with a business background.

So, I was really pleased to hear about the details of the Northwest Entrepreneurs’ Network’s First Look Forum (FLF) earlier this week. The FLF replaces the annual Early Stage Investment Forum (ESIF) that NWEN used to run, with some big differences, the biggest one being that it’s not an investment forum. NWEN properly recognized that there are already plenty of investment forums in the area, but there was very little for the stage before that. And they recognized that early stage entrepreneurs need more than money — they need help. The forum is designed to:

• Recognize early stage companies that show promise and could benefit from the process.
• Help the companies to take their idea and make it presentable, through intensive, personal coaching.
• Provide presenting companies an audience of qualified angel investors that they can present to and network with.
• Provide those angel investors with interesting opportunities that they probably haven’t heard about before.

• What’s the Market and Opportunity?
• What differentiates the concept from others?
• How can the business scale?
• What traction do you have so far?
• Who are you? What’s your experience?

Roy Leban is a serial entrepreneur who is currently CTO of Groupthink. He blogs about his startup experiences at thisDev, where this post is syndicated from, and about user experience at thisUser.

However you feel about Snoop Dogg, you have to admit he’s good at producing hit records.

Mr. Snoop is inundated by new artists vying for his attention. A nod from the great Dee-Oh-Dubba-Gee can launch a career. On MTV Cribs, the Doggfather showed us how he vets sample tracks. It’s not what you think — a sound-proof room with a dizzying array of equalizer knobs and $50,000 speakers. No, he takes these tracks and plays them on a little cassette player on the floor.

A cassette player. On the floor. Turned up a little too high so it crackles and distorts during the loud parts.

Why? Because songs have to sound good even on a cheap car stereo with distractions and tiny speakers and an obnoxious guy in the back spilling you-don’t-want-to-know-what on your velour seat covers.

So how do you get a song to sound good in the real world? Music producers suggest that you should use crappy speakers when mixing tracks. If it sounds good on crap, it will sound good anywhere.

This principle applies in an odd way to your company’s pitch. As much as you’d like to believe otherwise, your prospective customers have as many distractions as a group of teenagers listening to the car stereo.

This is true regardless of the medium. Your web page competes with announcements of “You’ve got mail,” instant messages about funny YouTube videos, and the ultimate escape of the “back” button. Your magazine ad competes with a ringing phone and the pull of a more interesting picture on the next page. Your 10-second pitch at parties and tradeshows is dulled by cocktails, the din of the room, and the more interesting story in the adjoining conversation.

These aren’t even “competitors” in the “products, features, services, benefits” sense. It’s competition for attention.

So what can you do about it? A few quick ideas:

• Record your pitch in a noisy environment (a bar, a playground). Play it back; does it still make sense when you can only make out sixty percent of the syllables? Ask victimsfriends to point out what’s engaging and what’s not.
• Lay your printed material on a table and cover up different parts of it with a magazine. Your entire message doesn’t need to shine through, but is it eye-catching enough for someone to notice the fragments, to become interested?
• Use marketing techniques that repeat a message. Distractions and other priorities will come between you and your target most of the time. Repeating often enough (using newsletters, blog, Twitter, Facebook) can push some of your communications through the chaos.

It’s not enough to be compelling when you have 60 uninterrupted, full-attention seconds.  Your pitch has to work in the noise.

Jason Cohen wrote this post and allowed us to syndicate it. He is the founder of Smart Bear Software, maker of Code Collaborator, the world’s most popular tool for peer code review and recent winner of the Jolt Award.