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Episode Date: July 11, 2014
https://youtu.be/4w3da70TnZs
You created a product that you believe is awesome. Your next big hurdle? Convincing everyone else. Crushing your product demo is both an art and a science, and Jason breaks it all down for you here, step by step.
Top Insights
- Show your product and use great examples so the audience can understand and connect with it. This will make them believe in you and what you're trying to build for the world. That's what you need to get the funding and support you need.
- Little details in how you present are what will make your presentation shine. They will separate the professionals from the amateurs.
- When you're on stage, you do not want to have a technical problem. Bring pre-recorded presentations of your product and try to have an additional laptop if you can.
- Be ready for any contingency.
- Don't point out where things go wrong. Just keep going.
- You need to show your product and convince people that it deserves to exist, get funding, get press, etc.
- Founders who are heads down inside of their products are terrible at demonstrating them because they're thinking about the thousands of different reasons they created the product, not the 2, 3, or 4 simple, virtuous, and important things about their product.
- The world wants things that solve a problem elegantly.
- Founders often spend the first 2 to 3 minutes speaking about themselves and why they built the product. What that signals to the audience is that you don't actually have a great product.
When someone doesn't show me their product quickly, whether it's in an elevator, at an event, on stage, in a private meeting — I just start in my head thinking, "the time it takes for them to get to the product is negatively correlated with how good the product is." - Jason