As an entrepreneur, your “pitch” is one of your most important assets, and one that you should be constantly refining and practicing.  Yet many of the entrepreneurs we at NEOinc work with, either haven’t even developed a pitch, or never practice it.

A pitch, or elevator speech, is a unique, compelling profile of the business opportunity your start-up represents.  It needs to be short, typically around 60 seconds or less.  It’s only goal is to intrigue a potential investor that you deserve a follow-up meeting.

Good pitches are short on details and long on the big picture, especially the financial opportunity represented.  Your presentation style, comfort and passion are important intangibles that can help prop a so-so pitch up or kill a great pitch.

So how do you develop a great pitch?  There are no shortcuts here, just good old-fashioned, roll-up-the-sleeves, hard work and practice.  You develop your pitch.  You practice it; over and over.  You pitch your family, your friends, even complete strangers.  You ask for feedback, particularly criticism.  You video yourself and watch to see how good you actually come across. 

A good pitch is a lot like true love; hard to find, but you know it when you see it.

Now there’s a tool to see bad and good pitches alike, and get some independent (read: brutally honest) feedback on your pitch.

TechCrunch, a weblog dedicated to profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies, has rolled out Elevator Pitches, a community video project that allows entrepreneurs to pitch their start-ups to the general public.  Visitors then have a chance to comment and vote on the pitches they like the most or least.

This About page gives a few more details, including how to submit videos for review.  It’s pretty simple; even an engineer can do it.  (We’re kidding).

Your pitch is absolutely vital to your start-up.  Investors typically have around a 15 second attention span when you get in front of them.  Developing a solid pitch, that speaks to why they should be interested, delivered with passion and in simple terms is ironically one of the hardest things you will do as an entrepeneur.  Here’s one more resource for you to use as you develop yours.