Elevator pitch. Gone in 60 seconds.
Sometimes, by chance or not, you end up in the same elevator as an investor. That means you have a chance to present your project to someone who might invest money or at least give truly useful feedback.
There is a myth that if your product is great, it will "sell itself." In reality, if you cannot explain what you do in 60 seconds, that is bad news: either the product is still vague, or you do not yet understand how to present it. And that is normal. Someone virtually tailoring custom shoes does not also have to be a born public speaker.
But how do you do it in one minute? For a founder who lives with the project day and night, it is hard to compress everything into a single minute without producing a mess.
A good elevator pitch is never just a description. It is the core meaning.
A simple formula:
1. Who it is for 2. What problem it solves 3. What exactly you do 4. How you are different (optional, because you may not fit it into a minute)
Sometimes this exercise makes it obvious that there are no clear answers to those simple questions. Or the explanation drags on forever. If you have to spend half the minute explaining the problem itself, that is already a warning sign. That is where the rules of a strong value proposition come back into play.
In short, this is a good way to understand whether what you are building is truly needed at all. At that point, the investor is almost secondary.
I recommend everyone try it. Create a 60-second elevator pitch just for yourself. Sometimes it is surprisingly hard to summarize in one minute the thing you have been obsessed with for years.
Take care!