PitchLift

After doing a minimal launch in February, we've had a busy first 6 months, with a higher than expected quantity of clients engaging us to work on deck projects.

Some takeaways from this post-launch period:

• Google Ads has worked well for us, with a good level of conversions. We started with a fairly high budget (recommended by Google to match our competitors) yet have since reduced this to keep monthly costs more reasonable.

• We have revised our service offerings after seeing which services were more popular and had more success. I think that this is something we will need to constantly monitor in order to make sure our services match our clients' needs.

• We have also revised our website a few times to try to optimize conversions. The latest update was carried out this week, so we're still waiting to see if it has any impact, but the other updates both seemed to improve conversions.

• Getting paid is complicated! We reached the point where we were able to start paying the founders for their work yet have spent some time trying to figure out the logistics of founders in different countries. We've recently been speaking with a CPA so hopefully we'll be able to resolve it soon!

The next 6 months will be crucial to see how the business grows after the initial success, as well as to try to establish a regular stream of clients. I'm excited to keep working on it!

After months of preparation, refinement and improvement, PitchLift is ready to launch! We're planning an organic rollout, with word-of-mouth and recommendations as an initial source of clients, followed by some marketing and advertising alongside announcing our service to as many different startup-focused websites and media outlets as possible to get our name out there. We believe we have an awesome service that will really help any startup increase their chances of success in the capital raising process, we just need to connect with them!

The latest big push has been on improving and refining our pitch deck content reviews so that the advice given is useful, appropriate and actionable. We ran a series of tests where an advisor who is managing director of an investment fund reviewed different reviews we have produced for some early beta clients. From this process we expanded and improved our review guidelines and revised the review template we use to include a new section where "actions" are listed in a much clearer manner than before. I think the reviews have really been taken to the next level and offer a lot of value for any startup who wants to validate their pitch deck.

We've been testing PitchLift over the last few months and it's really helped us refine the website and internal processes, so we have something that it much more solid than before. On the website front, based on feedback we updated the order form to improve how the summary was handled (more obvious what services have been ordered), and rearranged some of the content so that each page had a more defined role within the site. We also optimised our internal processes to automate a bunch of things with Zapier, so that everything runs more smoothly once a client has made an order. Next up is to refine our Content Review service!