Monday mornings can always be an interesting time. Co-workers greet each other with the typical “So, what did you do this weekend?” Many will talk about various events they attended or watched on TV like the kids’ soccer match or the game between two football rivals. Others will talk about a home project they worked on or a short trip they took, while some will just state how they did nothing. So maybe it was nice to break the Monday morning mold when my answer to the water cooler question was “I started a new tech start up.”
On the evening of Friday, October 12th, a group of locals gathered at Emerge Memphis in downtown Memphis to pitch new business ideas to a community of programmers, graphic artists, marketers, and other business experts for LaunchMemphis’ 48 Hour Launch. The goal was simple — pick a couple of the ideas and over the course of the next two days build them into potential new businesses. I was amongst eight other potential new start up CEOs to pitch an idea. After presenting your idea, it would be up to the community to pick the ideas that would be worked on. The only problem was you only had 2 minutes to pitch your idea to the packed room. At the end of two minutes a blow horn would go off and
you were done.
Complicating my pitch was that my idea had no name and was already hard enough to explain in five minutes because it didn’t exist anywhere in the world, so two minutes was going to be a challenge. This would mean I had to get to the point fast. Many call this an “elevator pitch” because you should be able to tell another person the whole story by the time the two of you complete an elevator ride together.
So here was my elevator pitch —
