Tips on how to demo your startup

Techcrunch just republished a great article Jason Calacanis wrote on how to demo your startup. Jason’s advice comes from his own experience and from having just sat through 200 company demos for the recent TechCrunch50 conference. Besides the advice for arriving exactly 15 minutes ahead of your meeting (I’m always late, so this means a lot to me), I love his advice on getting to your product demo early:

The longer it takes for you to show your product, the worse your product is. Folks who have a kick-ass product don’t spend five or ten minutes “setting the stage” or “giving the background.” Folks with killer products CAN’T WAIT to show you their product. Their demos start with their homepage and quickly jump into the users experience. If a picture tells a thousand stories, then a product demo tells a million. Show your product immediately, and if you don’t have a product to show don’t take the meeting.