PitchCoach is a mobile app that helps coach female digital media entrepreneurs in 'perfecting the pitch' for their innovative startup ideas. It was inspired by one of the greatest challenge female entrepreneurial journalists face: raising capital. How does one make a pitch? Where would she start? What would she say? PitchCoach aims both to help women get started on composing their pitches and to help them get feedback from those with more experience than themselves.
Key features of PitchCoach include guidelines for pitching experts incorporated into a guided questionnaire for pitch creation, a self-recording feature to practice, real-time collaborative commenting on pitch videos, easy swipe throughs between video pitches, and real-time comment updates while the video plays.
PitchCoach has two parts: The first is a pitch creation feature that includes a list of questions prompting aspiring entrepreneurs for the necessary content for their pitches. What is your idea? Who is your main competition? These are the types of questions PitchCoach asks and provides detailed tips on how to properly answer them. Upon finishing the guided questionnaire, you are given a summary of your presentation and after viewing what the important points are that you want to mention, you can practice your pitch by clicking the "capture video" button. This video gets saved in external storage for you to view.
You can then use either this video or any other pitch you've filmed of yourself in PitchCoach's collaborative pitch criticism platform as well as comment on other people's pitches.
When you open this part of PitchCoach, you are first shown a stream of new pitches that the app believes are relevant to your expertise.
You can also see a list of your own pitches so that you go to the viewer and see what constructive comments have been left for you by others.
Upon clicking on a video you are taken to the Pitch Viewer page. Apologies for the video in the screenshots...we didn't have the time to find a pitch!
Here, the pitch plays above while the interface allows you to easily comment right below. The comments area scrolls automatically so that it shows, in real-time, the currently relevant comment on that point in the pitch video. This comment is also highlighted for visuals. This allows the user to see feedback on her performance while she is rewatching her pitch.
The comment box's message reads "Comment on xx:xx" so that the user understands that he or she is commenting on it in real-time and meant to leave multiple comments rather than simply give one overall comment on the pitch. Tapping on it allows the user to add a comment. Upon submission, the timestamp is recorded, the comment is sorted into the comments list at the appropriate time, and the video automatically continues so that the experience is fluid and uninterrupted.
Pitches are easy to go through. You can get from one pitch to another simply by swiping to the left.
We are most proud of the ability both to allow pitching experts to leave real-time comments and to allow pitch creators to view their comments while watching their videos. We are also proud of the part of the pitch creation app that provides advice for women on how best to answer the most pivotal questions when it comes to pitching.
The pitch creation portion was built on Android and the pitch review portion, on iOS. We decided to go this route to prove that the technology is possible on both platforms and maximally accessible to women in digital media because there wasn't enough time to complete a full application on both.
We believe that PitchCoach will narrow the gender bias gap in the pitching world by making it easy enough to create a pitch that women aren't afraid to try and by allowing them to practice with peers and experts all over the world before the big day so that they are prepared to pitch their ideas professionally.
The iOS Code repository is here: https://github.com/jasonyjong/over-the-pitchfork
The Android code repository is here: https://github.com/logicdevil/IWMFhackathon
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