So… Just how did FlatClub win the TechCrunch One-Sentence-Pitch Challenge?
Meet Nitzan Yudan. He’s our CEO & the Co-Founder of FlatClub.In January, we won the TechCrunch One-Sentence Pitching Competition – ranked 1 out of 650 start-ups globally. Here, Nitzan explains how he did it…
Since winning the challenge, I've been asked several times about the secrets behind our success. So here are my four FlatClub rules that helped us win:
Don’t Sleep…
"While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked… With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.” I know that they say sleep is good for your health and it makes you think clearer but I prefer the insomnia approach. When you don’t sleep you have more time to do. When nothing is real, then everything is possible. You can dream. You can achieve. In this case, I saw the post about the competition when it was launched - UK night-time. It gave me enough time to think, write, and post - and still be one of the first to join. Always be the first.Make Mistakes…
“Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.” (Tyler Durden). The only way to learn is to try and fail. Then try again, and fail again, and keep improving by making small mistakes. Only because I had pitched FlatClub badly so many times in the last year, was I able to improve and sharpen it to one good sentence. If you don’t make mistakes, it means that you’re not really trying and you’ll never be able to change the rules of the game.Prioritize…
“You have to know the answer to this question! If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?” As entrepreneurs, we always have more good ideas than resources. The challenge is to find the best ideas, prioritize, and stay focused. I prioritize my to-do list every week and every day. If TechCrunch wasn’t high on the to-do list, I would have never made it to the competition in the first place.Share Your Secrets…
“I look around, I look around, I see a lot of new faces. (Crowd laughing) Shut up. Which means a lot of you have been breaking the first two rules of Fight Club.” (Tyler Durden)
Life is not 'The Social Network'. No one will steal your idea. Even if they copy it, there is a huge gap between a great idea and a successful company - this gap is execution. Competitors will come and you must create a good enough value proposition to ensure you can win against the competitors. It can be IP, business processes, team, or know-how. Ideally - all of them. While developing the idea for FlatClub, I shared the “secret” with as many people as I could. I got extremely valuable feedback which helped me better understand the customers “pain”, develop the better solution, and most importantly – learn who my target market is and how to talk to them. These were also the steps I followed in the One-Sentence-Pitch. If it works for Fight Club, it can work for you as well.