Watch out for Irish startup to hit London village
I wrote a post yesterday about the Curry 2.0 event which I hosted in Dublin recently, where we had startups pitch their business proposition to a chef. If you can pitch to an Indian chef whose first language isn’t English, you should be able to pitch to anyone. Sound like a good laugh? It was 
James Kennedy from SmartNote delivered the winning pitch. Personally I thought James had a slow start. However, in his closing argument he saved the day by contextualising his pitch to his potential customer as soon as he realised he wasn’t getting through. James’ use case was to send text message reminders to Jaipur’s customers.
James will now be flown from Ireland to the UK where he’ll attend OpenCoffee London to meet other likeminded people. Take a look at his proposition (James you really need to work on that Web site!) and if you’d like to partner or simply collaborate with James, please let me know and I’ll setup a meeting. Please feel free to get in touch if you’re a potential customer too. Following the OpenCoffee, James will attend an Internet People dinner thanks to Robert Loch’s kind invitation. Perhaps I’ll get him to stand on a chair at OpenCoffee and give a 1 minute pitch. What do you think?
Microsoft was kind enough to provide the winning pitch with a presentation pointing device, a copy of Vista and a copy of Office 2007. My thanks go to Ben Childers (get a blog Ben) and Ben Tamblyn.
Note to people who give short pitches. Keep it simple.
- Explain the problem
- Explain how you’re going to fix the problem
- Explain why your solution is the best.
I was on one of the panels at the Essential Web event recently where this simple approach wasn’t taken by the majority of presenters. There’s another long awaited post to be written.
4 Responses to “Watch out for Irish startup to hit London village”
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I met SmartNote (presumably James) at BarCamp Dublin.
Turns out their office is within minutes of my Dublin home.
I’ll finish the job on Saturday I hope, but I’ve put a good few of the pitches up on YouTube now. I’ll keep adding to the list of links on my ‘winning pitch’ post until all the acceptable clips are up.
@Julian – please include a ping back or a comment so we know when you’ve done it. Thanks for capturing the moment!
Ok, everything worth sharing is now up. Sorry for taking a while to do this. We relics of bygone ages like to think we remember a more leisurely world.