[Talk] A talk for startups at Venture Café Tokyo

Overview

Organizer: Venture Café Tokyo
Date: Thursday, June 13, 2024
Venue: CIC Tokyo (Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo)
Title: “What should a startup with no money and no track record do right now?”
Speaker: Tasaka, Representative Director & CEO
Session page: https://venturecafetokyo.org/sessions/startup-action-nichemedia/

Background

Venture Café Tokyo is a startup community that meets every Thursday evening at CIC Tokyo.

It is known as a gathering place for investors, entrepreneurs and engineers, and Nitche Media has been involved with the community since our founding.

The theme this time was a fundamental problem many startups fall into: a lack of PR skills. Many companies have great ideas and technology, yet miss opportunities because they cannot get their message across.

Words like “differentiation” and “targeting” fly around, yet many companies are not even making their story stick in the listener’s mind...

With that concern in mind, the talk tackled head-on the question of “how to win people’s hearts, and what to do first to get there.”

What we talked about

The talk was built around five themes.

0. The weakness of “TIME IS MONEY”

“Time is money” is right when thinking about your own productivity. But that is only “your side of the story.” The time someone spends on you is also part of their life. So “TIME IS MONEY” only gets a “triangle (△)” — partial credit.

Without starting from this awareness, even a simple pitch becomes an act of taking someone’s time — their life — one-sidedly. And trust never builds.

1. What is “noise information”?

The “convenient information about ourselves” that startups tend to put out is different from what people actually want to know.

The talk pointed out, with concrete examples, the opportunity lost by continuing to send messages that are nothing but noise in an age of information overload.

2. Can you introduce yourself?

A self-introduction should be 10 seconds at most. We proposed a structure: “use the first 5 seconds to say who you are (past and present), and the remaining 5 seconds to talk about the future.” Using Nitche Media’s own self-introduction as material, we demonstrated how to improve the summary and the tempo. And if you are not the smoothest talker, make it part of your character.

3. Think about being liked!

We organized this along two lines: “being prepared not to force yourself to be liked” and “not going out of your way to be disliked.” What to do is simple — just two things: “tell the truth” and “talk about yourself (as self-disclosure, not self-indulgence).” When you disclose yourself properly, your talk naturally works as a filter: the people who fit stay, and those who don’t move on.

4. Not a hearing — think of it as “reporting”

A simple hearing ends as “information gathering for work.” Reporting is different. You research the other person in advance, prepare likely questions and answers as a tree diagram, and empathize with their feelings, not just the information. “Knowing” and “understanding” are different things — and the very attitude of trying to understand someone builds a relationship where they remember you when they need help.

Comment from the speaker

I was so happy to see so many people come. What stayed with me most was hearing from the Venture Café Tokyo team, who always take such good care of us, that “this is the first time we’ve seen this much laughter here!”

I spoke with the hope that “anyone who gets involved with us might become even a little happier.” Since many people involved in ventures and startups seeking investment came, I think we were able to go a step further, discussing questions like “how do you convey the value of your company, project or product to others?”, “is so-called ‘differentiation’ really enough?” and “why is typical targeting not enough?” I was truly happy that so many people came up to talk to me after the session. In the spirit of “if it doesn’t exist, make it,” we hope to keep contributing to everyone’s future, even a little!

— Tasaka, Representative Director & CEO