Should You Pitch Your Startup To Your Friends?

Would you want to pitch your startup idea or your MVP to your friends before banging the investor’s door ?

I asked this question in the Startup Specialist Group on LinkedIn and had some interesting answers from global experts and entrepreneurs.

Some of the answers were really interesting.

Should You Pitch Your Startup To Friends

Harish Gupta, MBA, made the first point: “Don’t pitch to friends, pitch to a business mentor first. Friends will always be skeptical but business mentor will give genuine feedback.” I guess Harish has a valid point

Muralidhara Reddy: “I believe in pitching freely and fearlessly to anyone… Make a short pitch; and carefully read the reaction, listen to responses with full attention. Don’t have to complete the story…still you will get valuable feedback and insights when you do that with a purpose. ”

Ad Bresser added : “It pushes you to make a first pitch. Their positive feedback gives you some trust, their remarks gives you the areas to improve. Remark with the latter: your friends’ profile might be different from the next pitch, so take that in account!”

Meenakshi Vashist added a very valid point: “Pitch to anyone who is interested to listen. Let the feedback come. It can be great to downright ugly, so be mentally prepared for that. Listen very carefully what are people trying to tell you or what are they asking you. It will help you not only to refine your investor pitch but would also indicate pieces of your business which need more think through or maybe pivots.”

In the middle of this awesome discussion came Colin Braithwaite and shared a very interesting point: Depends who your friends are!

This gave a different kind of momentum to this whole discussion. If your friends could be the ones who could be your prospective audience for your product as a buyer or as an investor in whatever format, why not screen them and pitch out to them first ?

Charles Toh continued with his great thoughts: To be honest…If not your friends then who…Especially if you have a great idea…do you want to share a Great idea to strangers or friends?

While the entire group was discussing came this awesome thought from Sujay Gupta who said it loud and clear: Pitched to 6 friends…They are now my co- founders!

In Conclusion

I think while this discussion is underway in the Startup Specialist Group understanding the perspective to this question is very important. I feel if your friends are the ones who could help you refine the product or help you in opening some doors or least build you some channels to get to your end customers or investors, no matter how critical they are but they should be pitched first to start with unless you feel they might not contribute at all.

[This post by Ravi Kikan first appeared on LinkedIn and has been reproduced with permission.]