You get into an elevator, and an important investor gets on with you. You strike up a quick conversation and have less than one minute to explain yourself, your business, your goals and your passions. Can you do it?If you tend to stumble around on your words like I do, it may help to have a pre-written and memorized elevator pitch ready. This is especially to have at conferences, investor meetings, job fairs, or meetups. We've built you a totally free and private Elevator Pitch Generator. Just fill out these few fields and it will spit out an elevator pitch you can memorize: 

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 HERE'S YOUR CUSTOM 10-FLOOR ELEVATOR PITCH :This is the full version of your elevator pitch:

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 HERE'S YOUR CUSTOM 3-FLOOR ELEVATOR PITCH :This is the super short version of your elevator pitch:

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Some tips for a good elevator pitch:

Now there's no "formal" rules on what constitutes a good elevator pitch, but here are some general guidelines and tips to follow. 

TIP #1.) It should be 30 seconds or less.

If you're going up the elevator with someone, and they ask what your company does, you should be able to answer it in that brief amount of time.Keeping your pitch brief also makes YOU narrow down what your business is. If someone explains their business to me and it takes longer than 1 minute to explain, it's 95% likely THEY barely understand it either!   

TIP #2.) There should be a goal (or ask).

You need have an "ask" in your pitch. This means at the end of the pitch you should ask for some sort of action. The action doesn't have to be asking for an investment or something heavy like that, it can be simple as asking for the person to visit your website. Here's some example "asks" you can use at the end of your pitch:

• "...you should checkout our website."
• "...would you be interested in a free demo?"
• "...you should signup to our email list, it's really helpful."
• "...we could have our engineer integrate our software for you."
• "...we're almost done with out Series A round, would you be interested?"
• "...if you ever have any brutally honest feedback for us we'd love to hear it."

TIP #3.) It can help narrow down what your business does.  

I've heard businesses take many many minutes to just explain what they do.  This means THEY have no idea what they do.Narrowing down a long-winded explanation of what your businesses does can be incredibly helpful for the business owner, the employees, and especially the customers! For the 60 Second Pitch:There’s a lot that can be communicated in a minute. Choose what you want to include carefully.The order of your pitch may be different, but here’s a template for those precious 60 seconds:

Introduce yourself — 5 seconds.
Explain who you are and what you do — 5 seconds.
Get their attention with a statement or question — 5 seconds.
Discuss your USP and how it’s unique — 10 seconds.
Share your accomplishments — 10 seconds.
Communicate your goal — 5 seconds.
Offer a follow-up meeting.
Give/take business card — 15 seconds.  

Elevator Pitch for Students and Interns:

A common elevator pitch is for students and interns looking for jobs at a job fair. When meeting a lot of people in a short amount of time, it really really really helps to have a solid elevator pitch for yourself. This could be something like:

We're essentially following a similar pattern to the investor pitches above, but just modifying it to fit a job hunter. Knowing how to pitch yourself at something like a job fair is important because you'll be repeating the same thing over and over, and getting your pitch down solid is very helpful for telling people what you're looking for. You'll also save a lot of time, because if the company is NOT looking for someone with your qualifications, with this elevator pitch you'll both know it's not a right fit immediately.  

 P.S. If you thought this was helpful for making an Elevator Pitch, I send out a lot of similar things via email every week....sign up for my weekly email newsletter.