What if My Pitch Didn’t Make the Cut?

IF YOU PARTICIPATED in one of 100 Urban Entrepreneurs’ recent business-pitch events but your company wasn’t selected for admission into the 100UE funding-and-mentoring program, we hope you learned a lot just by being there — and you can find plenty of tips and advice about money, business networking, mentoring, startup strategies and more, both at 100UrbanEntrepreneurs.org and our sister site, TheCASHFLOW.com.

If your pitch didn’t make the cut, don’t worry. We’ll be conducting several more live biz-pitch events throughout 2011 in cities across America, and we accept submissions here at 100 Urban Entrepreneurs 24 hours a day — just click here to upload yours.

If you’re going to resubmit your business idea for our funding committee’s consideration, though, you’re likely going to have to refine and improve it. What are some common reasons 100UE doesn’t decide to fund and mentor a particular company?

• You haven’t presented the idea clearly.
• You never clearly articulated how your business could become profitable within 12 months of funding.
• Your business has been in existence for more than two years.
• Your business is a nonprofit lacking a clear path to sustainability.
• Your idea is a project, not a business.
• Your submission and pitch didn’t demonstrate how your idea could be scalable, simply executed or sellable.
• You didn’t define your business’s primary competition, how you plan to beat that competition, why consumers will be interested in your product or service, or how consumers will discover and learn about your business in the first place.
• You didn’t tell us much, or anything, about yourself and why you’re interested — and uniquely qualified — to bring your business to market.
• You didn’t provide a mockup, visual aid or prototype of your business’s product.

Need to get ahold of the 100 Urban Entrepreneurs team for any reason? Please contact our Submissions department at Submissions@100UE.org, and we’ll be happy to address any additional questions you have.

Thank you again for participating in our Howard University 60-Second Business-Pitch event. We hope to work with you, both in person and via TheCASHFLOW.com, to make your company a success.