Photo: Joseph Okon, Pexels
Most founders treat the ninety-second pitch as a marketing exercise. They open with a montage, they use the word 'passionate', and by the time they get to what the business actually sells, sixty seconds are gone.
The panel watches hundreds of these. What holds attention is specificity: what you sell, who buys it, what it costs to make, and what you would do with capital. Four facts, delivered plainly, beat a beautifully shot minute of nothing.
Start with the transaction. 'We sell handwoven cloth to twelve boutiques in Lagos and Abuja. Last month we shipped four hundred metres.' That single sentence tells a judge more than a full minute of vision statements.
Then the constraint. Every business that needs to scale is stuck on something, a loom, a cold room, a driver, a licence. Name it. The programme exists to unstick precisely that kind of thing, and naming it is not weakness. It is evidence you understand your own operation.
Close with the ask and the arithmetic behind it. Not 'we want to grow', but 'two more looms takes us from four hundred to a thousand metres a month, and we already have the orders'.
Shoot it on a phone. Good daylight, quiet room, one take if you can. Production value has never won anyone a place. Clarity has.
Judges are not looking for polish. They are looking for a founder who knows exactly where the money comes from.
Written by
The Her Biz Desk