In January 2012, I stood in front of five
angel investors on the popular RTE television programme Dragons’ Den,
pitching my idea, ProduceHere.com - a marketplace website I had been working on with three other lads for sourcing local food & craft directly from Producers and advertising their local distributors. We subsequently shelved the project but this blog post was written for WaveChange.ie to share my experience of the pitch.
It was pretty easy to get onto the show, we had a topical idea and a
relatively common story behind us-unemployed graduate, making a go,
don’t want to emigrate, yadda yadda yadda. We went for a brief meeting
(I was late because I’m late for all meetings) and a few days later,
despite forgetting to send in my proper application they called up and
invited us on.
Before the day, the Wave Change team (Thank you Ffiona) did me a huge
favour by arranging a practise pitch with an investor in their office
named Anthony, who grilled me with his two colleagues. They gave me two
hours and basically told me exactly how to pitch it. They tore my idea
apart, which was great, and I came out feeling like someone genuinely
gave a shite and hadn’t dismissed it out of hand. Two hours we spent on
it and it was the best best help I have received from anyone I have
described the idea to.
On the day there were a few individuals and partnerships hanging
around, one having received investment earlier on in the morning (we
joked about that meaning the Dragons were either in a good mood or had
run out of money!), and we were fed, watered and well drilled on every
element of the pitch. How anyone could go in and forget any of their
initial pitch is beyond me as you have to do it around twenty times
before you head up the stairs.
The actual room is huge and you do feel very small and far away from
the Dragons, but if you remember that they aren’t superheroes that can
eviscerate you with lazers shooting out of their eyes then there is no
reason to be intimidated.
Despite the fact that we needed the investment, I was resigned to the
fact that we would never get it. My justification for going on the show
was that there is never a good excuse not to push your idea out into
the public, even just to inspire another, potentially more competent
& grounded individual to develop a similar enterprise. Your idea may
be unrefined, but there is no proper way to refine it than to lob it up
in the air so reasonable people can take repeated swings at it. If it
is good enough it will come back down where you want it to go, but if
not it will be knocked clean out of the park, maybe for good. And then
you have the personal problems of your own communications abilities. You
will never be able to confidently persuade another person without
throwing yourself into the ring, even if that means putting your ego
through a properly bruising experience.
What I had to pitch was not what we were working on in the actual
business. We had realised previously that what we were working towards
wasn’t going to work in the short/medium term, so we were working on how
to change the model but hadn’t come to any concrete solutions yet.
Faced with that circumstance, the worst thing you can do is try to make
something up on the spot. You have to go with the original flawed
strategy and accept it as it is in order to portray it in the most
confident manner possible. There is no other option but to opt out.
In a weird way walking up and down the stairs like a lemon helped me
prepare for the grilling I was about to receive. It helped me relax and
made me realise the artificiality of the whole thing. I had to walk up
and down on the same side of the stairwell with my hands and the board
displaying the screenshots of the website in the same position roughly 7
times.
Dragon’s Den was all the more strange for that though. The
artificiality of it all laid a spotlight on the artificiality of the
whole procedure, whether pitching in the “real world” or with a pile of
cameras on you. You’ll never get it perfect and you’ll never be able to
prove your case unambiguously. Business isn’t like that.
I have portrayed the same idea to many individuals who have dismissed
it out of hand, only to find an identical vision fulfilled by someone
else in a different country or continent. This means it is largely about
you and your ability to complete the task. The idea may be incredibly
insightful, novel and potentially hugely lucrative, but if you don’t
convince them that you are professional enough to complete the task and
build the business in the manner in which they believe businesses should
be built, then your pitch will only serve to encourage them to keep
their ears and eyes open to someone else who can.
This means spending all of your time chasing investment or funding
can be hugely counter-productive. If I had been more experienced I would
have figured out how to generate some small amount of income and
develop the broader vision on the side. This would have convinced people
that I was, in fact, properly embedded in the real world and not living
on a government subsidised false premise. Sometimes your idea is just
crap, so be very open to that. Look for similar initiatives and research
their successes or failures. Don’t assume nobody is doing it yet, you
are not alone.
Those are my thoughts on Dragons’ Den. My final word would be that if
you ever have the opportunity to go for it, if you haven’t the courage
to put your ideas out into the public arena then they will never come to
anything.
