How such a simple pitch succeed at Web Summit?
Web Summit attracts hundreds if not thousands promising startups from more than 130 countries. Their PITCH competition is indeed the coolest startup battle where all shortlisted startups’ founders try to impress the judges and the audience during the given 3+3 minutes.
It was a great surprise for us, Aligner team, to get into the quarterfinals and receive plenty of compliments to our pitch, as the slides we prepared were really simple and meant for a supportive purpose. Most of the presentations were at least a little or in some cases even times more advanced, than ours.
But at startup battles, where the judges and the audience have to follow tens of performances in a row, it becomes difficult to grasp the main aspects such as problem, solution, or go-to-market strategy if your slides look too smart.
That moment we realized the power of our simple and straightforward pitch. Here’re our slides with a few recommendations:
Slide 1: Define the problem, current situation. Based on the feedback we collected from over 300 companies, 95% of them manage their multilingual content manually. Keeping policies, product descriptions, manuals, contracts, websites, marketing materials, etc in 25, 50 or 100 languages always up-to-date is a real pain!
Slide 2: Inefficiency will increase since the amount of content is predicted to grow 5x. The more content, the more resources needed to handle it. Companies really need a dedicated tool for working with multilingual documents. We accepted the challenges to make the future brighter.
Slide 3: Telling a story, how we got inspired by James Watson and Francis Crick, the first ones to demonstrate the DNA structure. Aligner team discovered that by creating DNA for every document and real-time DNA versioning, we enable the simultaneous updates of the content in over 100 languages.
Slide 4: Explaining what’s behind that magic. Aligner DNA detects even a one character change in a particular place and applies changes + translations into the same sentence in all other documents in an unlimited amount of languages. You work in one language, Aligner instantly updates all other languages. How cool is that!
Slide 5: Market size. How big is the cake? Well, calculations shown on slides are conservative. In reality, Aligner will compete with such giants as Microsoft, Google, Dropbox Paper.
Slide 6: User experience. Think of Dropbox — where you can add, edit, share and publish your content + add ordering proofreading, best machine, and human-powered translation services on the spot. All-in-one. Simplicity is the key.
Slide 7: Proof of concept. Talking about case studies where companies of various verticals and size updated their content in multiple languages 7 times faster than with any alternative on the market.
Slide 8: Liberal pricing models, that is suitable for individuals, startups, SMEs, and enterprises. Pay-as-you-go model. Again, simple and affordable for everyone. Freemium included.
Slide 9: Emotional moment… Just look at these numbers and imagine what it takes for Uber, Airbnb, Apple, Tesla… to become a global leader!
Slide 10: The team — introduce shortly the founders and explain why you think they will succeed.
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me!
