Quick snippets from our morning read on Monday, 29th March 2021
Would you be able to pitch your idea, your product, your service in 6 seconds if you found yourself in company of potential funders, customers or partners? Today’s morning read by Rajesh Anandan looks at the 6 seconds
You no longer have 30 seconds for your elevator pitch, you only have 6. Here’s how you can make the most of it.
Elevators and pitches
As I stepped into the elevator to go up to the 27th Floor, I couldn’t believe my luck. I was on my way to an event on AI, hoping to connect with a couple of folks on the agenda, and right there, walking into the elevator with me, was one of the speakers!
30 second elevator pitch, here we go!
I introduced myself. “I’m looking forward to your session…”. 26 seconds to go.
I launched into my pitch. “I’m one of the founders of…, we’re on a mission to…”. 20 seconds to go. I’m about to get to the “pitch” which I know he’s going to be intrigued by, a service to validate the accuracy of ML models! And we’re only at the 10th Floor.
Tweets and TikToks
As entrepreneurs, we’ve got a story to tell. It’s a story about making the impossible possible, about David beating Goliath, about the triumph of right over wrong. Because we’re living these stories, it seems clear to us that everyone should hear them — that everyone needs to hear them.
Here’s the catch: No one actually has time for stories anymore. And while you may have heard over and over again that you’ve got 30 seconds to deliver your elevator pitch, the reality is you don’t.
This isn’t arbitrary. The messengers have settled on these lengths because, for now, they’re what people are most receptive to.
Your 6 seconds
A few years ago, news broke that people’s attention spans had shrunk to 8.25 seconds, shorter than the 9 second attention span of a goldfish. Now there’s a sound bite. Of course it spread. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t quite true. As this BBC story clarifies, the 8.25 second “average” human attention span statistic was taken out of context because human attention is task dependent (so talking about an “average” attention span makes no sense), and while there’s been a ton of research done on Goldfish memory and learning, none of those researchers actually measured the attention span of Goldfish (because, why would anyone do that).
That said, I’m betting on TikTok’s AI having figured out the optimal time frame to capture a human’s attention based on crunching over 1 billion videos / day — 6 to 15 seconds. And if you have one shot to make your case, go with the AI’s judgement, and to be safe, assume you’re working with the lower bound of that range — 6 seconds.
Read the rest of the article here.
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