What do you do?

There’s an interesting post from a few weeks back by Guy Kawasaki in an article entitled “How to pickup a VC.” While it’s a short piece illustrating how boneheaded “attention grabbers” will work against you with VCs, I think it’s actually quite a good reminder about effective communications for any IT vendor.

I can’t count how many times I’ve sat through a vendor pitch or product presentation and after 20 minutes I’m wondering “Why don’t they just tell me what it is that they do?” Instead, I get a lot of discussion about open source freedom, community, business models, licensing etc. Hey, I get all that. What I want to know is what do you do?

Maybe we had an advantage with MySQL that it was relatively easy to explain to people what we did. People were already familiar with the concept of a relational database; we were simply commoditizing it, make it easier and cheaper to use, especially for web development and for software companies that wanted an embedded database.

So if you’re putting together a product presentation make sure you cover the following:

-What is it that your product does?

-Who is it for? (And give examples of customers using it.)

-What about your product makes it better than competitors?

-What about your commercial offering is better than the community version?

All that should be done in about 10 minutes without a lot of buzzwords. If it takes longer than that to explain what you’re doing, you’re either making it to complicated or you’re off topic. Once you cover the basics, then you can go into more details if the customer has questions. And remember Guy’s other great advice on the 10/20/30 rule of powerpoint: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font.