CS476/486 - Senior Capstone Design

Guidelines for Project "Elevator Pitch Mini-Video

Overview

One of the themes that is repeated again and again throughout Capstone is that the ability for you to describe, defend, and yes, sell your project to persons inside and outside of your organization is a vital skill for success in your career. Every deliverable that we complete during Capstone has this theme underlying it: every document needs an introductory section where you essentially remind the reader why this project is so cool and important...and sell them on your solution vision for it; similarly, every Design Review needs an intro that does the same thing. There should never be any public presentation where you do not "sell" your project. That's what keeps your projects funded and in a high profile position in your organization's mind.

This small assignment is aimed 100% at perfecting this sales pitch, by asking you to craft a short and glitzy "elevator pitch" video that introduces and sells your project. It also gives you a chance to learn some valuable basic video production and editing skills. If you don't know what an "elevator pitch" is, it's high time that you learn. The Wikipedia entry should give an adequate intro and some background on the name, but basically it's a short "intro and sales video" for your project. You have three minutes (the length of an elevator ride!) to sell your project to a bored and cynical venture capitalist. If you do it well, you'll get her card and an invite to give a full pitch of your project to the VC's board.

In our case, the prize (sadly!) won't be $6M of investment to bring your product to market, but we'll definitely be evaluating the submissions to see who is "mostly likely to succeed as a startup guru"! At very least, we will be reviewing each others pitches and scoring them (see below). There are also plans to have upcoming freshman and junior CS majors view and vote for best pitches.

The Assignment

Each team will create a roughly 2 minute (i.e., no less than one, no more than three) "elevator pitch" video for their project. Consider this "a commercial" advertising and selling your project. That makes it somewhat different than, say, a team report or a design review, where you do have to summarize the project but are focused on giving updates on progress, challenges, and timeline. Instead, the focus here is all on "the sell". A good rough outline for the "flow" of the video would be:

Start by outlining a problem that everyone in your audience can related to. For instance, if you're building a new video editor to help folks post their misinformation YouTube, maybe you'd start with "Last year, Google reported that over XXX billion videos were uploaded to their YouTube service. A study by <name your institute> found that over xx% of Americans had posted a YouTube video in 2021, up from just yy% five years ago." You can see what I mean: get the listeners attention by connecting to something they know and/or emphasizing the importance/size of the market.
Next, outline what's wrong. Continuing with the example, it might be along the lines of "At the same time, posting a good video remains a technically demanding process. <give some detail>. As a result, many non-technical users of YouTube — which is easily over 99% of user — are frustrated with the process, dissatisfied with the quality of videos they are able to post, or are simply discouraged from posting any videos at all". You'd probably want to cite some studies for those claims and statistics, but you get the idea. You want to have your audience nodding and saying to themselves "yeah, that's true, that's a fairly serious problem. Somebody should do something to fix that..."
Now you're ready to intro your idea/product. This is basically your "solution statement". And just as in our other deliverables, it should key in on the problems or shortcomings you just described in the last part. So maybe: "Our company was founded for and was driven by a passion for making technology accessible to everyone, not just technically gifted users. The idea for our SuperViditizer product originally arose from discussions on YouTube's help forums around the theme of how difficult it is to make really good videos for upload, and we have remained dedicated to this enormous majority of non-technical YouTube posters ever since. Our SuperViditizer takes a fresh look at video editing, providing easy access to the most popular editing tasks and providing a large selection of popular and easy to use special effects and filters...all packaged in a simple and intuitive GUI interface that even your grandmother could use to post a great video from her smartphone in minutes. Some specific highlights include <go into it, walk us through em, show us the fancy highlights>
Wrap it up. Basically spend 15 seconds reminding folks of the market --- how big, how many people, how much money. If it's not really a "consumer product", you could focus instead on how important it is to solve the scientific problem (or whatever) that the product is supporting. Then state that your product will have high/revolutionary impact to improve life for everyone involved and...this is the kicker for the conclusion...go into it a bit: describe what life will be like for your user community with the product in place. This could focus on quality (e.g., of the video clips that grandma can produce), or the speed of getting the key tasks done, or money saved, or whatever the benefits will be. Remember t focus on bigger picture benefits that everyone one understands, i.e., money, time, sales potential...and not on weird little domain-specific things like "will make updating of configuration files for the widget editor more clear".
The close: At the very end, you want to offer a way for the audience to engage. So maybe "To find out more about SuperViditizer, come visit our project website at (flash up the URL and your logo) <read it off>" Don't forget to tell folks the fantastic fun stuff they'll find there, e.g., "There, you can download a free testing version of the product" or, if the product isn't there yet, "you can view some conceptual sketches of key aspects on the product. There's also a place for you to leave us suggestions or feedback, if you have ideas you'd like to see integrated in the final product". You can see what I mean here: end with an invitation to get connected more with your project.

The ultimate goal here is to very compactly and clearly sell the **idea** of your product; in Round Two, you'll actually have some product to show off to close the deal. If you want to get a feel for the overall style and flow of something like this, you can check out some "3-minute research presentations". This is a global concept (universities everywhere do it, and it's a competition) where grad student try to present/sell their research projects in 3-minute talks. Obviously, a research project is different than an engineering one, and these talks are typically live with a person on a stage (like TED talks)...but you can learn a lot about how to engage your audience and summarize/simplify your work into an engaging story. Here is the NAU archive of these, Here is the similar site for University of British Columbia. Check out some of the first place winners! Of course, yours will focus more around slides/videos/demos that illustrate your words, but it's great for getting your head around the proper tone/focus as you work up your script!

We will ultimately do this assignment twice:

Round One: Concept Stage: at the end of the first (CS476) semester, as you have completed your requirements and have a good feel for the final product vision. This is actually the *harder* of the two repetitions because you have nothing concrete (screenshots, etc) to show yet; you are selling the *concept* of the product. At the same time, this is the most important challenge: if you can sell the concept effectively at this early stage, then you can certainly sell it once you have a prototype to flip through.
Round Two: Final Project Delivery Stage: at the end of the second (CS486c) semester, you will make another, very similar video...but you will now be selling not just the idea but also your implementation of it. Imagine that you are taking part in a "startup rodeo" event, where various teams are pitching their products to a group of venture capitalists, and each team is able to submit this one short "pitch video". The rough outline is still the same, but you can flip up some screenshots of cool screens that illustrate the power of the solution, or demo key exciting pieces of your product...whatever you feel would best "sell" your product to the viewers.

Details: how to do this

This is a really time-limited format, so there is absolutely no particular requirement that all team members actually present (though of course all should be involved in creating the pitch). If you can orchestrate speaker changes smoothly and instantly, however, you are welcome to do so...that can often be a cool effect, as different people say a few sentences about the product. Think about, for instance, commercials where various actors appear to each talk about what they really like about a product.

It terms of production style, that's up to you. If you have just a boring "talking head" of a person speaking, it's likely to be a flop. If you just show some slides/pics and just talk over them, it's likely to be pretty lame as well. What you want is probably a mix of people/faces, interspersed with slides or pics...maybe sometimes even a person super-imposed (it's called "green screen") on top of something, e.g., a shot of one product screen and pointing things out. You don't have to have a million bucks and super spendy editing software...just some minor exploration of open-source solutions out there should give you plenty of creative leeway.

During COVID year, we have to do *all* presentations as videos. That was non-optimal...but did highlight the value of having some basic mastery of this increasingly important medium to succeed in our field. Check out the tips, tricks and example videos that we put together; see the links on Video Presentations under "Fun and Useful Links" on the Info and Policies page of the website.

Deliverables