Fourth in a four part series about the birth of Zapier at Startup Weekend - Columbia. This post covers the Sunday and the final demo. For more details, review Part I - The Idea, Part II - The Pitch and Part III - Saturday.
Sunday.
Demo Day.
Easily the most exciting day of the weekend.
Everyone is busy hacking together last bits of functionality for their apps, rehearsing the pitch, and gearing up for the final presentation.
Here's what you need to know to nail the presentation and jumpstart your team into a real business that will last after the weekend.
Managing the Work Day
The only thing on Sunday that matters is the presentation. Forget all the grand plans you made on Friday and Saturday.
Narrow down on exactly what part of your app users will see that night and work on that.
Zapier has a whole dashboard view that will show off zaps and how often they are performing, but for the demo no one cares. So we scrapped it for Sunday night.
Don't be afraid to do the same.
Rocking the Presentation
So many people mess up the presentation for preventable reasons. Here's a short 3 step guide to that will automatically make your demo stand out.
Don't even think about opening Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi, or whatever other tool of choice you are thinking about boring users with. Simply doing step one alone will automatically separate you from 95% of the presentations.
Focus your opening statement on the problem space. Spend 1 minute tops talking about what problem users have. Use real life scenarios. The problem Zapier solves is that business owners have become glorified paper pushers and spend all day dealing with web apps rather than solving customer problems.
Focus the rest of the presentation on the solution and show how the product you built solves the problem. This is quite simple. Just run through how the app works. Show off the killer features. If at all possible get the crowd involved. We created a Twitter to Highrise zap that automatically made any Twitter user who mentioned @zapier a contact in Highrise and then asked the audience to tweet at @zapier. We had over 45 people tweet our name before Zapier broke. We had over 100 mentions in a 5 minute span with some big name people tweeting out our product. Simply adding a Call To Action will payoff big time down the road whether it's with Twitter followers, email addresses or Highrise contacts.
Now you're probably asking about business model, user acquisition, market size, and all the other jazz the judges care about.
Forget about it for the presentation.
Save it for the Q/A session. The judges won't let you off stage without answering these questions about your business.
You only get 5 minutes to catch the attention of everyone in the room with your product and solution. Use them.
Winning over the Judges
The judges are now impressed with your problem and product, but they've got questions. This is where prior preparation pays off big.
Know who the key judge is for you. For us, it was Jamie Stephens. He was the judge with the most experience in software applications. If we could sell him, we knew he could sell the other judges.
I had about four different ten to fifteen minute brainstorms with him over the weekend. After those, I knew exactly the questions he'd ask during Q/A, because I'd already answered those questions (or sometimes he'd answered them for us).
Celebrate
After a weekend of work, little sleep, and intense concentration you're done for the weekend. Even if the judges don't select your product as the winner you have plenty to celebrate.
You've just done something remarkable to 54 hours. Most people don't do the amount of work you've done in a weekend in an entire month.
You've learned more in one weekend than you've ever learned in an entire semester of college.
Most important - your product is positioned to turn into a real business.
After the weekend is done, you have functioning demo, you've talked with users, you've identified a problem and you have a pretty good guess at what a solution looks like.
Congratulations. Celebrate. You've just done what 99% of people haven't done.
Started.
