Hi, I'm Jan König 👋. I'm one of the founders of Jovo, 28 years old, and live in Berlin. < Go back to learn more.

How to deal with things that go wrong

A startup buddy had his first pitch ever last week, in front of a jury as part of an application for an accelerator (which is quite a big thing for a first pitch). 

He told me afterwards that everything which could possibly go wrong, went wrong. He opened the wrong slides and had to switch documents during the presentation. His phone started playing music out of nowhere, and other stuff. Not a very good start.

Guess what: he got accepted! Why is that? First off, it’s a cool product. But I believe there’s also some other factors that came into play. Let’s look at this graph here:


It’s a counterintuitive theory from customer relationship management that states that if you handle customer complaints in a positive way, people could actually be happier after a negative incident than before.

The 🔑: When all those things happened during his pitch, he didn’t take himself too seriously, made a few jokes and then proceeded with the presentation. When he left even one of the jury members said "ha, you did everything on purpose so that we remember you, right?"

Two things why I think stuff like this works:
  1. It’s way more interesting to see how people deal with things that go wrong, than seeing a well orchestrated pitch.It’s also advice by the pitch doctor when people ask him whether they should do live product demos during pitches: No, because it’s very likely to go wrong (bad Wifi, bad timing etc..). But yes, do it to show that you can deal with it in case it goes wrong.
  2. Making mistakes is just human. (reminds me of this episode I wrote in February)

Similar thoughts?
-Jan

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