A great two-minute pitch can win a startup some significant cash these days, from elevator pitch contests at MIT, Purdue, Duke and elsewhere.
To help entrepreneurs get started writing a solid pitch, the Harvard Business School created a nifty interactive tool that breaks the process down into five steps: explain who you are, what value you provide, why you’re unique or better than others and what your immediate goal is (or what you want the person listening to do) , and then review and refine all of that.
You can type each of those elements into the Elevator Pitch Builder, and it compiles them and then analyzes what you’ve written to estimate how long it will take to recite and how many words you repeat. It also offers a few general pieces of advice.
This might be simplifying the process a bit too much, but it’s a good place to start. For more advice on writing a great pitch, see these posts on asking investors for their elevator pitches, acing a VC pitch and what filmmakers can teach entrepreneurs about pitching. (But don’t forget to avoid these frustrating buzzwords.)
