Learn how to pitch

This session, Prof Gilbert discussed about Elevator Pitch. Elevator pitch is a term for marketing pitch originated from Silicon Valley. This is what I captured from Prof Gilbert’s lecture. Buildings in Silicon Valley usually have not more than 4 or 5 storeys (or levels). When a soon-to-be entrepeneurship wants to seek investors, he goes to these buildings. Usually he arranges the meeting with the potential investors in their office, mainly located in the most upper level of the building, Sometimes, the investor meet him on the lobby and take a lift with him to go to his office. And this is where elevator pitch happens. On his short trip to investor’s office, he will present the pitch to them. Since it takes only about 2 – 3 minutes, the pitch must be prepared very well. All the trivial details should not be included to give time for important ideas to be demonstrated.

Now that we’ve learnt the concept, next step is to make an actual one. In group, we are required to create an elevator pitch about Tourism-On-The-Go, the course big project. We are given about 3 – 4 minutes to present a video explaining the concept of our project. Together with Damar, my groupmate, I prepared a set of presentation slides. Our group idea is to create a new helping tool for foreign tourists visiting Singapore. The tools developed are mobile- and web-based.

Before I explained further about the tool, I’m going to explain the issue that we address. The current problem with the Singapore’s tourism is that out of 9.7 million visitors in 2006, only 34% of them paid a visit to Sentosa, one of Singapore’s tourism signature. The number grows for Orchard Road with about 67% of them went there during their trip. From these statistics, we can interpret that something might be wrong with the way these attractions being advertised, or the information given to the tourists about how to reach these place (one of the reason they don’t go is probably that they didn’t know how to get there).

So, here comes our idea. First idea is to introduce PlanUrTrip, a web-based service where everyone can go to arrange their trip just like NTU student’s arrange their timetable through STARS. On this service, they will be presented with various options of places they would like to visit. Each day during their trip will be divided into many slots, which span for about one hour. Each slot is going to be filled with the activity of visiting places they want to, or just a void, since they might not be interested to go anywhere, except café or restaurant during lunch time.

Next idea is TakeMe.2, a mobile application to guide the tourists to go from one location to other. We develop this idea since the transportation might be a problem here even though government has put many instructions and helps. This application will require a Java-enabled mobile phone for installation.

As for more details on these two ideas, I will explain it on the post about our Business Plan. For now, let’s just take a look on our elevator pitch on Youtube.