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This is part 1 of the series: 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches.

Listening to first-time entrepreneurs talk about their competitive advantages is as predictably invalid as the local weatherman’s 10-day forecast.

Between this blog and reviewing applications to Capital Factory I see hundreds of pitches a year. Every pitch has a section on competitive advantages, and quite literally 95% of the time the claimed competitive advantages are pathetic, unoriginal, and not really advantages at all.

The first clue that your competitive advantages aren’t actual advantages is that everyone else on Earth claims those advantages too!

P.S. Next week I’ll talk about what are real competitive ..read more

Every founder frets about competition from a big company, me included.

We scoff at their inability to innovate and for prioritizing shareholders over customers, but still we quiver in fear.

Dozens of people on Answers.OnStartups ask about it so I know I’m not alone. It always goes like this:

I’m just a two-person operation with no budget. What if a huge company with a hundred software developers and a million dollars in marketing budget decides to copy my idea?

Answer: You’re dead! Give up! No small company has ever survived competition with a large one!

Oh wait, that’s not true. But poking fun doesn’t help; maybe this article will.

First, take a deep breath and remember ..read more

Dear Joel,

I regret to inform you that I must decline your invitation to be a featured guest blogger for Joel On Software.

I realize this will come as a shock, especially given my well-documented need for attention.

The fact is, I don’t care how many thousands of readers you have, how many millions of dollars of software you sell, or how many minor celebrities worship you. ?At the end of the day, you appear in a little window in an RSS reader. You fill in a template consisting of a cute story tenuously connected to a dramatic point, inspiring wanna-bes to commiserate and laugh with indignation at the stupidity of others.?

While they’ve been laughing, I’ve wondering whether you practice what you preach. You admonish programmers who don’t ..read more

You already know the elevator pitch is critical to your business, not just for pitching but to crystallize the goals of the company in your own mind.

You might also have developed a one-line positioning statement — a single sentence that defines the company in a simple, clear, sentence. ?Not one you’d use on customers, but rather something to tack on your wall, something that all marketing and communication should be working towards.

The Venture Hacks blog teaches us about something even smaller and tighter — the high-concept pitch. The idea is to boil your message down to a short phrase that references existing, successful products. Examples:

“YouTube is Flickr for video.” “LinkedIn is Facebook for business.” “Twitter is Blogger for Attention Deficit Disorder.”

I like brevity, but ..read more