3 lessons from Brooklyn Bridge Ventures’ #NotAPitch Night

Pitching isn’t just a skill. A good pitch tells you something about an entrepreneur. It tells you that they have worked hard enough and thought hard enough about what they are working on that they actually understand what’s important about it.
It seems counterintuitive, but anyone who has undertaken a long creative project can tell you: you don’t do work to make something; you work, and the work tells you what you’re making.
Brooklyn Bridge Ventures founder Charlie O’Donnell organized a #NotAPitch night on Monday at Brooklyn Law School to give a bunch of new founders some experience with getting shot down.
As he explained at the start of the event: there was very little at stake. O’Donnell wasn’t really considering making decisions based on what happened in the room. He wanted to give founders a low-stakes chance to hear why an investor might or might not invest in what they were doing.
Mostly, it fell on the “not” side.

"It's scary to me to invest in anything that depends solely on the protection of a patent," @ceonyc #NotAPitchNight

— Technical.ly Bklyn (@TechnicallyBK) March 30, 2015

One can imagine that most founders there held out hope that there was some chance O’Donnell would ask for a private meeting later. Whether any of them got it or not, founders got a good workout in hearing pointed questions and understanding how investors think.
Here are three pitches that illustrated something for us, revealing lessons about what makes a strong pitch.

It was good to get an update on what journalist and entrepreneur Erica Berger has been up to. We covered one of her ventures, Mileage Media, in 2013. Now, she’s working on Catchpool, a media discovery platform where users are limited in how much they can share and there’s no user feedback system for posts, so no one is competing to see who gets the most “likes.” Catchpool is currently in a closed beta.
Berger said, “I think Facebook is great for me because I have interest friends sharing interesting things, but they sit next to baby pictures and engagement photos.”
Facebook, however, wants to bring the whole story into its stream. O’Donnell said that seed funding for any media play is tricky. What they want to see is big numbers. This also squares somewhat with the recent investment in Atlas Obscura, five years after it launched.

This founder just gave his name as Seth. A Columbia master’s degree candidate, he’s working on a way for cryptocurrency to be used to make big trades untrackable. He says he’s met with stock traders who say they want to make big purchases without anyone knowing they did it. Bitcoin may make this possible.
O’Donnell said that this was the sort of product that will only appeal to a very small number of people. Additionally, it’s in a space with some of the smartest programmers. He advised that the founder focus on assembling a brilliant team, so that as they pivot, entrepreneurs are impressed by the team more than the core idea.

AdChat.io is a prodcut that, according to its founder, is very nearly ready. It’s a product for high-value sales leads, where ads on websites would actually have dialogues built right in where a potential buyer could chat directly with a representative of the company without leaving the page.
The idea is that consumers would chat with real people (unlike Blue Messaging’s AdChat, which simulates a real person in chat).
O’Donnell called this a “spreadsheet business,” because he said that there’s a spreadsheet that would tell you whether or not there was a business there. His take: AdChat needed to get tested with some paying customers.

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The product that seemed to grab O’Donnell the most was Felix Zeltner’s SoundFriend. It’s mostly just a Tumblr right now. Zeltner started it by sending a regular email to music experts and asking them to send him one track they were really into each week. He started posting the tracks and, before long, a public radio station in Germany reached out to him for a possible collaboration. The station broadcasts five recommendations a week and funding from the arrangement has helped SoundFriend expand its team.
It’s hard at the outset to see how it varies enormously from Hype Machine, in particular, but maybe its smaller, curated pool is the site’s silver bullet?
O’Donnell said that there are companies founded by MBAs who look for a space in the market and then there are companies founded because someone is into a thing. “A lot of the stuff that ends up being really big,” O’Donnell said, “is the stuff that starts with people who aren’t sure if their thing is a thing.”
Here are a few other bits of insight from O’Donnell over the course of the night:

• One product. A founder looking at ways to keep students in college was addressing several problems. Focus on one problem.
• User experience. O’Donnell loved the idea of a product that could take a finite amount of time in a foreign city and plan something great for set amount of time, but wondered if how it sounded in his mind would feel as good as the actual experience. He advised the founder to really focus on user experience.
• Media. “Don’t pitch a media play as a problem,” O’Donnell said. No one knew they wanted cat GIFs until the internet gave them to us. No one sat around and said, “If only there were a way to see more cats being funny.” Media creates a need for itself when it’s good.
• Angel investors. Don’t hesitate to ask people for money if you have something cool. A lot of angel investors, O’Donnell said, are buying interestingness. They want to be a part of the culture and the industry. They don’t need more money.
• Open source. One company looking at an enterprise-level solution for email servers knew that they’d have to appeal to IT departments first for initial sales. O’Donnell said the security side could be a strong argument for them, but as long as they were small and looking at coders, he asked why they hadn’t considered going open source and getting lots of people involved for free. Then they could follow the Red Hat model of offering services on top of an open source product. Or, closer to home, the InfluxDB model.