This Saturday, May 27th, the stage is open to anyone wishing to practice and get feedback on their elevator pitch.

Montreal Startup Pitch Challenge, put on by Défi Montréal, is one of three regional pitch challenges happening around the city this weekend that are open to anyone, regardless of experience. The Longueuil Challenge will take place today, May 25th, and the Laval Challenge will take place on May 29th. The 20 best pitches from these three regional challenges will move on to the Grand Final on June 1st.

“We organized this Startup Pitch Challenge for the first time last year to have an easy way to find and promote the best entrepreneurs,” Martin Duchaine, one of the organizers of Montreal Startup Pitch Challenge told MTLinTECH. “We found in the past two years of the program that the elevator pitch is much better for entrepreneurs. It is shorter, it can get much more punch in one minute and a half, it’s a much clearer way for people to understand what their project is and what they want to achieve.”

The event is both an exercise and a challenge. The idea is also to give the entrepreneur a bit of coaching. Participants get one hour of basic training about the technique of an elevator pitch and why they should master it. They are then divided into teams with coaches in order to practice and get feedback before they go on stage.

Another thing that is important to note is that anyone in the audience can vote.

“Anybody with a smartphone can vote on all the pitches. It’s nice because the audience is not passive, they are all members of the jury. And at the end you get to know which are the best ones very quickly, and you also know where the other ones need to improve to get better. So the feedback is one great part of this challenge.”

The Startup Pitch Challenge is useful training but it is also an introduction to the Montreal startup ecosystem. Investors attend the events, especially the final, but so too do other entrepreneurs and anyone interested in learning more about the startup community.

“It’s important for investors, but it’s a wider audience than that. At Startup Pitch Challenge it’s really to get entrepreneurs to know other entrepreneurs. So anybody who loves startups and is interested in new ideas can come to the challenge. Yes, there can be investors that come. At the final event, we have many investors who come and like to scout for new companies and find out who will be the next interesting one. They know that we have many good companies that have come through this process. But the main goal of this challenge is to get more entrepreneurs to be recognized and see all the possibilities at large.”

You can sign up for the Montreal Startup Pitch Challenge here.