The Pitch for Round 1
Pitch day - and despite setting out with acres of time, cars, vans and lorries decide they want to make the journey to Liverpool with us – slowly!! and a 90minute journey takes 180minutes and we miss our slot.
first rule of pitch sales techniques…don’t be late. Oooops. F***
Any nerves we felt on route, were smoked and bitten away, but on arriving at Sony Liverpool, we become serene, and giggly. It’s a calming building and, though we have genuine doubts as to whether what we want to pitch is of any interest AT ALL to Sony and the guys at Pixel Lab, we’re ready to go for it. We’ve some nifty slides and a ripomatic we’re proud of and even I’ve grown a set of balls!
So, yes, we’ve pitched a banana in an apple flavoured world – but what a buzz! I love pitching (I know, I am getting help for this one)
As we crack on with the pitch, I realise that our ethos, our desire to push boundaries and try something slightly left of field is, though probably not what Sony want, it is something that we will persue beyond this pitch and this process has helped define a future vision for Savvy that, if Sony don’t buy it, we will continue down this road. Which, again, we have GITG and Northwest Vision and Media to thank for – an opportunity to think big and plan bold.
The 6 (or was it 300 panel members (felt like a lot around that table)) gave us a really exciting, thorough, uplifting and heated gentle grilling which is exactly what we needed. And the two or 3 unanswerable questions - that were asked (you know the kind, small matters like business models, making it pay…..) took us to the heart of the holes in our pitch idea…. holes we knew were big ones, and that we weren’t sure we could fill.
By the end of the session we knew that we were knocking on the right doors in terms of the sorts of products we wanted to develop, in terms of what shape we thought the future might become and we knew that Sony would hear our pleas again but now wasn’t the right time. Marcus had made a convincing technological knowledge and plan, Richard proved the possibilities with some wider research and a good deal of gaming knowledge and I, well, I got all over excited and empassioned… it’s a flaw.
Rather ill advisedly, I found I could no longer contain my over theatrical nature and left thanking them for listening and saying that although it was a wild card – wasn’t development about pushing boundaries? and the chance to try something different? - and if funding like GITG wasn’t the chance to aim high and wide what was? And anyway what did they have to lose?
I was thankfully rescued by the team from climbing my soap box (which in the absence of one may well have become the conference table…. and we left, knowing we’d blown it but were strangely ok with that; in the time we couldn’t have done more.
Half way down the M62 (Where were all the cars from earlier!!!) Marcus had a Eureka moment and we found a plug for a big hole and realised what we were missing… c’est la vie.
So what happened?
When, late Friday evening, 2 days later, I got a call to say that no one was more surprised than the panel of judges to be giving us one of the 5x 10k to take our ideas further……. we were for a very brief moment Speechless!
