May 3rd, 2011
Ninua Pitch Deck from 500 Startups Demo Day
Posted by: Travis | 1 Comment »
Ninua, the startup building social apps around news, blogs, and social media, recently had an amazing demo at the 500 Startups open house. In it, they showed off their Ninua News Reader for Android. I asked Ninua’s founder and CEO, Waleed Abdulla, about how he prepared for the big event.
He told me that Ninua and the rest of the startups presenting went through an iterative process to hone their pitches. In addition to the advice provided by Dave and Enrique at 500Startups, some of the startups collaborated to improve each other’s pitch.
The few startups in our batch started a daily pitch practice a week before demo day. We’d all get together and present to the group, get feedback, and then incorporate what we learn the next day.
Waleed shared four lessons he learned through this process:
- Start with what’s interesting or impressive. Don’t leave the good stuff to the end.
- Use pictures, and very little text. It keeps your audience from falling asleep.
- Keep it simple. Don’t be tempted to include every detail. Those can be discussed in a follow up meeting.
- Practice pitching to friends. And keep doing it until you feel comfortable with it.
Take a gander at what Waleed and Co. came up with.
Ninua News Reader is built on top of Ninua’s first app, NetworkedBlogs, which allows bloggers to syndicate their blog on Facebook. With over 1.7 million active monthly users, NetworkedBlogs is easily the largest news community on Facebook. In addition to feeding you recommendations from it’s 700k feeds, Ninua News Reader plans to leverage Facebook’s social graph to recommend news stories your friends and people with interests similar to you are reading. For more information, visit the Ninua website or check out their CrunchBase profile.
[...] Your Team – Dave’s slide #22 done in Ninua’s Slide #16 Team [...]