Dating service WishDates read out a rap to a potential investor and published it on YouTube. The team is looking for as much as $1.5 million.
Last year, the startup claimed to have attracted millions of users and started generating revenues with zero advertising budget. However, the service needed investors and not stingy ones. “We plan to raise $1.5 million or find a traffic partner for the corresponding amount of traffic in terms of money,” said Alexander Shevchenko, financial director of WishDates, in a recent exchange with Ukrainian tech blog AIN.UA.
The idea to do a merry pitch came to Alexander after many presentations that he witnessed in Ukraine. “Being at events and conferences, I had to listen to monotonous or dull and droning or off-key or falsely-optimistic presentations. Then I translated into Russian language several articles from Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures. They describe the main points to be reflected in the presentations (product description, competition, competitive advantage, monetization, etc.). The trigger was likely the phrase ‘the goal of a pitch is to sell, not educate. Your task is to excite, not to inform’,” said Shevchenko.
Next came the idea to put it in poetic form and a rap emerged. The team tried to put the recitative to music and the result was according to everyone’s taste. Then they decided to shoot a movie on their own. All of the roles were played by employees of WishDates and the investor is portrayed by none other than the CFO of the company.
Reached by Ukraine Digital News, Reichert found the video “very fun.” In his advice to startups, he notes: “Almost every guide to developing an elevator pitch suggests that you pack the six to eight key points of your 85 page business plan into 120 words. The result is usually an unintelligible gibberish of techspeak embedded in a cloud of superlative adjectives.” WishDates definitely understood the message.
