The Secret to Winning a Start-up Competition

Your PowerPoint is awesome (and memorized). Your pitch is crystal clear. You're adequately caffeinated and totally pumped up. Here's why that's just not enough.

inc.com http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/winning-a-start-up-competition-coffeetable.html

The Secret to Winning a Start-up Competition

Christine Lagorio | Inc.com staff

Nov 20, 2012

Your PowerPoint is awesome (and memorized) Your pitch is crystal clear You're adequately caffeinated and totally pumped up Here's why that's just not enough

Courtesy Company

Former venture capitalist Ben Choi is CEO of CoffeeTable

There's probably no higher concentration of former debate-team captains and Wharton MBAs than at a San Francisco start-up competition These events are full charming serial

entrepreneurs who can make even the clunkiest PowerPoint tolerable They're great

networkers who tend to wear a perma-grin

Ben Choi doesn't fit this mold He speaks quietly, at a measured clip He's never started a

company before, and he's never pitched at a start-up competition But he knocked it out of the park last week at San Francisco's Under the Radar conference, at which 27 companies pitched their business ideas to panels of industry executives and investors

Although Choi didn't have the slickest presentation and wasn't the best speaker, he did have precisely what actually it takes to win: a why-didn't-I-think-of-that kind of business idea backed

by a solid business model The product is called CoffeeTable, and it's a beautifully-designed and simple-to-navigate app for viewing retail catalogs on an iPad (As of this week, the app is also available for the iPad Mini and iPhone.)

Here's what it looks like:

CoffeeTable has quickly become the No 1 catalog app in the iTunes store And the one-year-old company has only raised one round of funding: $2.5 million from RR Donnelly, which is not a

VC firm but a 150-year-old $10 billion company that prints catalogs (RR Donnelly is banking that CoffeeTable will take it into the future.)

The CoffeeTable app is free to download The company makes money by charging retailers based on how often a catalog is opened, ostensibly to drive purchases through the app

(Clicking on a product in the CoffeeTable catalog takes you to the corresponding product page

on the retailer's e-commerce site.)

"Retailers spend $15 billion a year printing and mailing catalogs, and most of those catalogs go

in the trash," Choi says "In contrast, they pay CoffeeTable only when a shopper chooses to open their catalog."

CoffeeTable is also working on analytics that will help retailers make more effective catalogs digital or otherwise by tracking users' interactions with the electronic catalog pages

Roughly $270 billion in retail sales is generated by catalogs, according to the American Catalog

Mailers Association CoffeeTable has more than 170 retail partners, including Crate and Barrel, Neiman Marcus, and West Elm And with iPads expected to be in 40% of homes by 2016,

CoffeeTable targets a growth market

When Choi stepped up to pitch his start-up to the Under the Radar conference, he noted these sorts of statistics He also showed a massive image of Angelina Jolie, along with a quote

recently attributed to her: "Brad and I were on Amazon.com for the first time a week ago But

we got lost…I'll stick to catalogs."

Jolie, one of the highest-paid actresses in the world, isn't exactly a natural stand-in for an

everyday consumer, but the slide was a super-simple nod to a diversity of theories (paradox of choice; digital divide; retail-as-therapy) that may explain why retail catalogs continue to be browsed, hoarded, and even prominently displayed in homes In other words, why print catalogs still exist despite Amazon And why it's not a far leap that they merge with the iDevice that already sits next to the stack of them on your, well, coffee table

Choi had tough competition In his category, he went up against ShopAdvisor, a save-it-for-later service that alerts consumers when an item they want to buy is available, or when it drops

to a certain price It's already used by digital magazines, brand advertising, and media sites to build in deferred shopping The other two competing companies were Swarm, an in-store

smart-phone-based customer platform, and Best Decision, a social-recommendation engine for retail items

In the end, Choi's pitch won not only his category shopping but also took home the Judge's Choice overall award for best company His reaction was characteristically humble "I'm not an experienced public speaker, but I enjoyed it," says Choi "It was a lot of fun to tell the story." The Angelina bit went over particularly well, he says: "People laughed."

Christine Lagorio is a writer, editor, and reporter whose work has appeared in The

New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village

Voice, and The Believer, among other publications She is executive editor of

Inc.com @Lagorio