Pitching Your Entrepreneurial Passion
Mark Watson uses a reverse order communication at the first minute of his pitch to demonstrate why he believes that Ecotraction will be a successful product. He appeals to Dragon Den’s investors with a question of anyone being a dog owner, and further tells an experience of his dog dying three years ago from cancer. He supports this emotional appeal with a medical diagnosis of this cancer being caused by toxic environment, which was created from road salt. In this way, Mark Watson speaks about his beliefs of changing the future with environmentally friendly product rather than product properties and uniqueness, catching public attention from the first minute of his speech.
b) Mark Watson was successful in breaching personal bubble of Dragon’s Den investors by briefly describing the project and specifying the reason of approaching investors in about first 10 seconds. He successfully gets to the audience heart by indentifying a dog owner, further telling short story of his motivation to engage into eco-friendly salt business. Mark is also successful in answering the mind of investors by telling about product properties, as well as replying to concerns voiced by Dragon Den’s investors, demonstrating clear understanding of his business and key numbers. Mark was somewhat less effective in imagination stage, but this is probably why his partner was there to leverage the finalization point from financial and marketing perspectives. For a personal reapplication, it is important to conclude that the length of the speech, the awareness on essential numbers and the point of difference are important in constructing speech of a kind.
c) Mark Watson never mentioned on his previous experience in this or related industry. He simply demonstrated his awareness on the idea which he is going to realize and negotiated on favorable price and company shares. For personal ambitions it means that confidence in the project one would like to undertake comes from believing in its success and envisioning the way to realize, not previous experience or technical education in the field.
d) The idea is online platform which allows immediate sharing of textbooks for sale or rent using mobile application. With an average need of spending $500 - $1000 for textbooks per semester, having an online platform for used textbooks sharing could solve this financial issue. Applying 10 rules, it could be concluded that it is simple in terms of solving problem for limited group of customers. Having a single revenue stream for this idea comes from the limited boundaries of initial application coverage (e.g. one or two university campuses), with few steps required for making revenues (books sharing for small price and fee). Knowing the market and customer is automatically checked for all current students or recent graduates. Student learning is sufficiently high market thus further expansion is possible. Killing the idea could be realized by assessing Amazon and related distribution business, but since we are not targeting for large textbook sales, the idea still could work.
e) I want to have small ‘lifestyle’ operation servicing …
