Since last week I was asked a few times how did we make it win the TechCrunch One-Sentence-Pitching Challenge – ranked first out of 650 startups worldwide? So here are my 4 Flat-Club rules that helped us win:

Don’t Sleep…

” While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked… With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy” 

Yes, I know that they say sleep is good for your health and it makes you think clearer. But I prefer the Insomnia approach. When you don’t sleep you have more time to do. When nothing is real, then everything is possible. You can dream. You can achieve.

In my case, I saw the post about the competition when it was launched – UK night-time. It gave me enough time to think, write, and post – and still be one of the first to join. Always be the first.

Make Mistakes… 

“Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing” (Tyler Durden).

The only way to learn is to try and fail. Then try again, and fail again, and keep improving by doing small mistakes. Only because I pitched Flat-Club badly so many times in the last year, I was able to improve and sharp it to a one good sentence. If you don’t do mistakes, it means you don’t try and you’ll never be able to change the rules of the games.

Prioritize…

“You have to know the answer to this question! If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?”

As entrepreneurs, we always have more good ideas than resources. The challenge is to find the best ideas, prioritize, and stay focus. I prioritize my to-do list every week and every day. If TechCrunch wasn’t high on the to-do list, I would have never made it to the competition in the first place.

Share Your Secrets…

“I look around, I look around, I see a lot of new faces. (crowd laughing) Shut up. Which means a lot of you have been breaking the first two rules of fight club” (Tyler Durden)

Life is not “The Social Network”. No one will steal your idea. Even if they copy it, there is a huge gap between a great idea and a successful company – this gap is called execution. Competitors will come and you must create a good enough value proposition to ensure you can win the competitors. It can be IP, business processes, team, or Know-How.  Ideally – all of them.

While developing the idea of Flat-Club, I shared the “secret” with as many people as I could. I got extremely valuable feedback which helped me better understand the customers “pain”, develop the better solution, and most importantly – to learn who is my target market and how to talk to them. These were also the steps I followed in the One-Sentence-Pitch. If it works for Fight Club, it can work for you as well.

And always remember “This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time”.

Nitzan Yudan is the CEO & Co-Founder of Flat-Club (http://www.flat-club.com) – the world’s largest network of alumni & students of top universities for short-term renting. Flat-Club is a member of the London Business School Incubator. On January 2012 Flat-Club won the TechCrunch One-Sentence-Pitching Competition – ranked 1st out of 650 startups globally.

Flat-Club.com was awarded TheEmployable Startup of the Week yesterday and you can see more info on this by clicking here and a big congratulations from TheEmployable team to Nitzan for winning the TechCrunch One-Sentence-Pitching Challenge last week too…

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