Episode 004 - How Michael Goldstein is building SwitchPitch and making it easier for startups and big businesses to work together

Running a startup is hard, and securing potentially company-changing deals with large companies is really tough.

Our guest is trying to make that process easier and more transparent, and he tells us how he’s doing it.

Our guest, Michael Goldstein, is the founder of SwitchPitch, a business development marketplace that connects startups with big businesses with pre-approved budgets for technology projects.

Michael is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for bringing unique ideas to the light of day. His experience has centered around consumer facing, online, transactional businesses, but is as broad as selling cinder blocks to university students for extra storage space.

Throughout Michael’s many entrepreneurial ventures, he learned that many large corporations had needs that can be filled by startups, but startups just didn’t know how to connect with the right people and learn about these needs.

He soon realized that that there is a ton of opportunity for startups and big corporations to work together, and he’s making that process easier with SwitchPitch.

Michael tells us how he has launched SwitchPitch events in multiple cities and how he’s building an online platform to quickly scale.

The one mantra that we came up with is “Get Deals Done,” and that has driven every decision that we’ve made…it’s made it remarkably simple to evaluate things when you’re holding it against just one critical standard. (click to tweet)

In this episode, you’ll learn from Michael:

How he developed his entrepreneurial spirit by selling stamps when he was seven years old.
Why it’s so difficult for startups to develop relationships with large companies, and how he’s changing all that with SwitchPitch.
How evaluating all of your company’s activities against one metric – a “North Star” – can make it really easy to make the right decisions. There may be other metrics to analyze, but everything should be held against that one most important metric.
What Michael is doing to scale SwitchPitch, such as launching in new cities and building out an online platform to facilitate deals.
The importance of balancing both sides of a marketplace. In this case, making sure there is enough supply of funded projects on which startups can bid, and enough startups to bid for and complete those projects.
How carefully listening to big companies’ needs has helped him improve the SwitchPitch product.
The importance of measuring and understanding your unit economics in an e-commerce startup, as Michael did with his past company, DealPal.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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