Recently I was asked to teach the current cohort of FI MENA startups about idea validation (aka Customer Developmen), business models and revenue sources and mentor them through later sessions.
Full disclosure: I am NOT a member of FI and I am not participating in the FI participation scheme. I’m not a big FI fan and I chose to remain completely independent, but I’m a big believer in helping grow more founders and financial independence in underserved regions – so when the call comes, I tend to answer regardless.
And the winner was… an app to help people with diabetes!The Rheinland Pitch Summer Finals 2025 team!That guy – co-founder, moderator on stage, and pitch trainer behind the scenes since 2013.
Interested in my Pitching Masterclass for your students, startups, or employees too? Get in touch!
It was initially created to serve the Rheinland Pitch back in 2013 to help educate our regional founders and prepare them for raising money – and has been constantly evolving and updated ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served – and counting.
The Pitching Masterclass Startup, Student, and Corporate Edition used to only be available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or people lucky enough to be in an educational institution, incubator, accelerator, or corporate innovation program who had booked me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.
Some of my happy Pitching Masterclass customers…
Today, in addition to the on-premise editions, my Pitching Masterclass is available to anyone everywhere as on-demand eLearning, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download.
Also available in bundles, especially popular with companies and organisations, including prepaid online mentoring & support vouchers for employees, booked and managed by the teams themselves on demand.
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.
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! )
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