Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev) and Andrew Kryvorchuk about the main goal of the project Hey, Pitches!

New businesses appear in the market differently. One can have millions of dollars to open up a new deal. Another possesses valuable personal qualities like energy, zeal, ideas, ambition, and other things to offer at the initial stages of a startup. A really successful startup is one that combines people with various abilities and potentials. But the question is on how they can meet and pick up a common thing to work on. The better way out in this case is to learn how to pitch an investor correctly.

Therefore, a new project was launched to teach startup founders to pitch investors in Ukraine. It is called Hey, Pitches! and was initiated by the Adventures Lab venture fund alongside Genesis Investments. This project involves a selection of early-stage startups that require investment to answer the question that the startup founder will have to support them in building investors’ pitches correctly.

Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev), the founder of the Adventures Lab, and  Andrew Kryvorchuk, the managing partner, primarily shared the reason to set up the new project and the objectives to follow.

The notion “a pitch” underlies a project’s oral or visual presentation to potential investors. Such an approach focuses on appealing financing to a particular project. So, the Hey, Pitches! team knows how to work with this concept in the investment fund. They organized the first meeting with startup founders at the beginning of August. More than 60 applications were sent, and only 5 of the best were selected by the project organizers. Thus, they could spend an hour of productive time with each team.

Due to Andrew Kryvorchuk, the very idea of Hey, Pitches! came up when interacting with portfolio companies. The expert emphasizes that the project team collaborates with representatives of their portfolio startups through communicating with them. Mainly, they discuss key issues, plans, and questions at such meetings. Consequently, as such work is done within the investment fund, Andrew Kryvorchuk noted that a respective separate project could be developed with competent expertise on the board.

Another influencing factor in creating the Hey, Pitches! project was the awareness of mistakes young founders made in the early stages of their startup business. Mostly, it was related to poor preparation, lack of access to data, avoiding the use of basic information, etc.

Moreover, a startup usually focuses on selling itself to an investor at its pitch stage. And Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev) underlines that Hey, Pitches! follows a different goal. They are willing to help startup founders correct their mistakes, failures, and miscalculations before seeking potential investors in the market. Andrew Kryvorchuk calls such an approach of the project “anti-consulting”. It involves free consultations though others take money for expertise. He believes Hey, Pitches! will activate some startups developing in garages and apartments, and very soon, everyone will start talking about them, and European investors will get interested in them.

Also, Ruslan Tymofieiev notices that the project enables startup founders to look at their business from the outside point of view: to detect the project’s drawbacks, see their main mistakes and look for options to solve them. The experts do not provide ready-made solutions to a problem. Instead, they help startup founders come to some conclusions by asking questions and suggesting push-back answers.

The experts believe that Ukraine has a lot of potential startups, the existence of which many do not even know.