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Starting your startup journey, pitching tips and more with Kai Van Lieshout from Open Grid

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Starting your startup journey, pitching tips and more with Kai Van Lieshout from Open Grid

At the beginning of every founder's startup journey there is pitching.

Kai Van Lieshout, a uni student turned entrepreneur, is our first guest on the blue bean bags talking all about his startup journey and key tips for pitching. He discusses his key tips he learnt along his journey through the EnergyInc program and representing Australia and the global Red Bull Basement University Pitching Competition.

Kai started his journey in the startup space with EnergyInc, SBCs very own pre-accelerator program for entrepreneurs with big ideas. Kai submitted and completed the program with his idea Open Grid, a peer-to-peer energy sharing platform that helps individuals, who generate their own energy, sell it to their neighbours at a wholesale price. This allows the producer to make a little profit and the consumer to access cheaper energy!

This idea refined through EnergyInc helped Kai take the first steps on his startup journey and learn the ins and outs of key skills you need as an entrepreneur - one of these being pitching.

We outline some key tips around pitching for anyone looking to start a business.

Kai’s top 3 don'ts are :

  1. Don’t try to sell your business you have a solution to a problem - share your story that way
  2. In the early stages, don’t focus too much on the financials and instead try to tell a relatable story of your solution in action
  3. Don’t spend too long on it overthinking and changing stuff - give the main points, make it short and to the point

Top 3 tips are:

  1. Talk about the problem first and then go into the solution
  2. Practice practice and more practice
  3. Have a variation of pitches for different audience types that you adjust and tweak to drive your point home

Pitching is core to any entrepreneur's journey, especially at the start. It’s about communicating with your audience, encouraging them to potentially invest, buy your product or join your team.

So how is your pitching going?

Did this video help you better understand how to go about pitching? We’d love to help with even more. You can sign up to our newsletter or follow us on socials to receive our short insights regularly.