Turning the pitch up
Most developers go about pitching online poker rooms their products or services in a manner that almost guarantees rejection, says Bill Rini, poker blogger and former room manager at PartyPoker - who shares some tips on how to avoid the typical pitfalls.
MOST developers go about pitching online poker rooms their products or services in a manner that almost guarantees rejection.
Whether it be not understanding the marketplace and the poker room, or not clearly articulating the value proposition being presented, vendors and potential business partners need to understand that the poker room is their customer – and if they don’t understand their customer, they are going to have a lot harder time selling to them.
I’ve heard more than my fair share of pitches from people trying to sell products or services to online poker companies and I wanted to share some tips on that might be helpful to aspiring entrepreneurs.
Tip #1: Understand the Market
Poker is not just a game, it’s a business. Quit looking at your product or service from a player’s perspective and start looking at it from a business perspective.
Tip #2: Don’t Pitch Flaming Logos
Several years ago IBM ran an advertisement that spawned the phrase “flaming logo,” to describe ideas that are cool but have zero business value. The ad featured a website developer showing his boss his website with a flaming logo.
The boss responds, “You know what would be a great idea? If people with PCs anywhere could order our products and that was all tied together. Inventory, billing, vendors. You know, the works. Then that would change everything.”
The developer looks at him blankly and says, “I don’t know how to do that.”
Don’t be the web developer.
Tip #3: Solve a Problem
The biggest problem facing online poker rooms is liquidity, how to get it and how to keep it. But very few ideas address that simple premise. Most pitches are to add a new feature to the software or to add some new form of poker. But new features and variations on poker don’t drive traffic. New customers aren’t going to play on a site just because of a software feature. If that were true PKR would be the biggest poker room on the planet.
Tip #4: Don’t Waste My Time
Nobody wants to give you an appointment to pitch your offering if they haven’t the faintest clue what it is. People’s time is just too valuable to give it away to everybody who asks for it.
If you can’t explain your product or offering where I can at least have a general idea of what you’re proposing via email or in a two minute conversation then I’m probably not going to want to jump through all of the hoops to find out more.
Ninety-nine percent of ideas people pitch are going to be of no interest. The numbers are working against you if you expect to get a meeting without a NDA being signed before you can even tell someone what your product is.
If you’ve done your job you’ve applied for patents or whatever so there’s no reason to play James Bond. If you haven’t done the legal homework to protect your product/idea then you’re not ready to pitch it.
Tip #5: Ideas are Cheap
If you run a poker room it’s not difficult to have a lot of ideas. You have your own, your staff’s, other employees in the company, players, affiliates, vendors, and even random people who unload every thought they’ve ever had about poker once they know you’re in charge of a poker room.
In other words, your average poker room manager has more ideas than he could ever implement in a single lifetime. Unless you’ve found a way to make gold out of sand, chances are if all you have is an idea, it’s not worth very much.
Find more from Bill at BillRini.com.