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    From recently on Ideablog : «A few words must be said about the presentation. This is one of the most important components of the investor search process. It must be prepared at the highest level. This applies to all its details: from visual accompaniment and the text narrated by the speaker, to the manner of behavior on the stage and the clothes of the presenter. It should be rehearsed many times, verified to seconds. It should not have “water”, unnecessary words and extraneous information. It depends on the presentation how much the potential investor will be interested, whether he wants to continue communication, or immediately forgets about the project. The impression of a number of really interesting projects was completely ruined by a weak presentation .

    There is hardly anything to argue with, but there is something to supplement and clarify.

    As Björn Straustrup noted, the best quality projects are often worse represented by their creators. It is interesting to understand why. One reason is immediately apparent: a brilliant scientist (specialist in general) is rarely an equally brilliant teacher (PR manager). More often these are two different talents. Therefore, in the startup team, it makes sense to separate these functions. But there is another reason.

    You may wonder what is the idea of ​​an Internet startup? Such a question would hardly arise in the case of narrowly specialized projects (which, probably, most). For example, somewhere there was a mention of a service that translates texts on request into any audio format. Probably, in connection with traffic jams and a crush in the subway, such a thing is relevant (and not only for these reasons). It is quite possible to explain the essence of this idea during the movement of the elevator. But what can you say if you need to explain the essence and relevance of, for example, blog services during the same time? Try to do this convincingly for a hypothetical investor, even now, when keeping online diaries is one of the most popular activities, and whole studies are devoted to analyzing the reasons for the popularity of blogs (for example, you can see the links on the Wikipedia blog page). Maybe, "self-presentation and communication services "is a suitable name. But it’s not just communication - a personal social network is being built in the Internet, a network in which many restrictions and conventions of the traditional social environment do not apply to masked people. We can say this is the idea of ​​an alternative environment for social self-realization of personality.

    Now it seems to me that the most conceptual things initially didn’t have such a clear representation for investors, as described in the quote above, but felt almost by accident - for some reason, some service fired, later analysts analyzed why, made clones with variations, mastered ideologically close directions. For example, what is Wikipedia’s primary idea - “Internet encyclopedia” or “user-generated content”? These are two different ideas, both in terms of abstractness (one is a concretization of the other), and, if necessary, justification of each separately. Moreover, in reality, these ideas are not two, but a whole multitude. For example, the traditional encyclopedia is the convenience of searching + a mini-format of texts + quality and maximum generality of consideration in this mini-format + coherence ("hyperlink") of most texts. Fortunately, all this does not need to be explained to anyone, since the encyclopedia is a long-known thing. Regarding user-generated, there is also something to analyze. For example, it turned out that interesting, high-quality and popular content is written by a negligible percentage of users, perhaps comparable to the total number of professional journalists of online publications. It turns out that this is rather the idea of ​​“social elevators”, an alternative to the traditional space of social self-realization of authors (although, for example, on Wikipedia the idea of ​​authorship is completely underestimated). Which in turn is directly related to issues of editorial policy or the idea of ​​user ratings in one form or another. These things become clear subsequently when projects gain a lot of experience; it’s possible to intuitively ingenuate this beforehand

    In the end, it turns out as if you were looking closely at something, and this thing, instead of becoming clearer and more detailed, on the contrary, began to radically change and transform into something else. As a result, you go to some deep archetypes, epistemology, sociology, psychology, esoterics ... (On this occasion, I remembered my old note Computer science and archetypes ).

    In the previous text Beginner's ThoughtsI expressed the idea of ​​the desirability of a certain resource, devoted both to the general systematization of Internet startups (resources in general), and to a specific listing of everything available in each of the areas. Now it seems that in addition to this information, the authors of these resources would have been very curious about what the initial plan was, how they presented it to investors and what happened in the end.

    Yes, but what are the conclusions from all this? There is no reason for start-ups to relax - the desire for clarity of thought is beneficial in any way) Well, perhaps, heed the advice of investors and highlight one idea from the list of interconnected ones, making it central, even if its dominance is not obvious. Here I am in doubt, which strategy is better ... And investors should be more attentive to those projects that are not presented clearly - perhaps the ambiguity of some of them is explained by their non-triviality :) However, I probably will write even a separate text Tips for investors :)

    To be continued .

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