Recently I had the pleasure to be back at the Igniton+ Demo Night, this time experiencing the startup that I’ve been (b2b SaaS for early stage sales & pitch) coaching in the 19th batch of the Ignition+ program from Digihub Düsseldorf & Rheinland winning “best pitch” of the batch.

UPDATE: Following the tradition set by the startup I coached in the previous batch, OSPHIM – Layer Performance went on to be awarded “Digital Start-up of the Year 2025” by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, BMWE) for their outstanding digital innovation! FTW!

Congratulations Laura and Lukas of Layer Performance! Perfectly delivered pitch, very well deserved!

(BTW, if you too want to improve your pitch, you can enroll in my Pitching Masterclass online – available anytime, anywhere.)

Recently, I was invited to mentor the teams participating at the 10th anniversary Startup Sprint Düsseldorf (think Startup Weekend, sans a global network).

I was also asked to do a little impromptu TL;DR on pitching, prepping the teams for what they could expect; If you can tell me which problem or need you are solving, for whom you’re solving it, and how – like a 6 year old child can understand – you’re already 80% on your way, 100% better than most! (want to learn how to pitch your startup successfully to investors? There’s my pitchingmasterclass.com for that! :)

Mad props to Ingo, Georgis, Peter, & team for keeping the volunteering up all these years! (And thanks for the shout-out, Peter – nice gesture to an OG! )