Simple Ideas

An entrepreneur needs to be effective when pitching a business idea. With a 'sticky' idea, you can utilize your network to help you find potential business partners, investors, suppliers, clients, and key contacts. After all, they will remember and be able to tell your idea to others.

In their book Made to Stick the Heath brothers present six elements that will make your idea understandable,
memorable, and easy to propagate or in their terms, 'sticky'. The elements are: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and with Stories.

A Simple idea has or can be achieved by:

• The "Commander's Intent":Comes from the military in which a commander tells his soldiers what to accomplish, if nothing else, during the mission. It defines the single most important thing that you want to accomplish.
  
  What is the single most important thing that you want to convey with your pitch?
  
  
• "Unburying the Lead": Is a journalism term indicating that a news story needs to start with the lead, or the most important element of the story. Sometimes the lead is buried in the middle of the story and people don't even get to read it.
  
  Identify the single thing you want people to remember and start your pitch with it.
  
  
• Core and Compact:Your message should be very compact in a single phrase and contain the core of your idea.  
  
  Define a single phrase that represents the core element of your idea.
  
  
• Use known concepts to present new ones:You are more effective if you present your idea as a comparison with other but highlighting the difference: Our software product is a scaled down Microsoft Office Suite but online.
  
  Describe your idea in terms of a well known concept and highlight the key difference.
  

When planning a pitch of your idea make it simple so it is memorable and can be spread easily through your network. What a better advertisement to your idea than someone else promoting it on your behalf.