There are plenty of great ways to come up with a serviceable elevator pitch. A quick Google search will come up with almost a million results. A few days ago, however, I ran across an article on TechCrunch that has what I think is the quickest, easiest way to formulate your own one-sentence business pitch, which is a great starting point for your company’s elevator pitch.

My company, _______, is developing _______ to help ________ do _______ with _______.

Not only is this a great springboard into the rest of your elevator pitch (which should be no more than a minute and a half long, since most people only have an attention span of 90 seconds), it’s also a good way to evaluate if your newest business idea has merit.

But once you have your elevator pitch perfected, you’ll still have to find someone with money to give it to. Preferably, a lot of people, because the vast majority of people you approach will most likely pass. Even great ideas sound dumb most of the time, and sometimes it seems like all the planets need to be in perfect alignment for a venture to get funded.

Luckily, there are events that you can attend where you’ll get the chance to give your elevator pitch to not just one or two potential investors, but an entire troupe of them. Events like the Venture Capital and Angel Showcase in NYC – where one of our managing partners happens to be speaking on Tuesday, February 7^th.

Not only do events like this give you a chance to hone your elevator pitching skills and try your luck with a number of different investors, they also do some of your homework for you. All attendees get background information on every firm in attendance so they can pick and choose who to approach.

But what if you’re not quite to the pitching stage quite yet? What if there’s still taking notes and getting your story straight? We can help you out there, too.

CapLinked is holding an online business-plan competition that has been narrowed down to five finalists, each of which will compete for the grand prize by giving their pitch to a panel of judges (which just happens to include another one of our managing partners) on Wednesday, January 11th.

Tuning into that discussion is free, so if you think you and your business could use a few pointers on crafting a great pitch before jetting off to New York City in early February, reserve a spot for the webinar.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with Wasabi Ventures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

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Tom “TK” Kuegler is a New England-based venture capitalist who grew up in Baltimore — and who hasn’t quite left the city behind. He finds himself here quite often, visiting family and volunteering with the board of sponsors at Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business.

Lately, though, he finds himself in Baltimore on scouting missions — for the next hot startups.

Kuegler is general partner and co-founder of Wasabi Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that funds and incubates technology startup companies. He’s based in Manchester, N.H., but spends his time scouring the East Coast for promising entrepreneurs and their companies.

He’s gotten plugged into the Baltimore technology scene, and by early next year, he expects to announce that Wasabi will invest in five local startups. Wasabi is also planning a competition in Baltimore in 2012, in which entrepreneurs will pitch their business ideas for a chance to win thousands of dollars’ worth of funding and mentorship.

The Baltimore competition will be modeled after one that Wasabi is holding in New Hampshire next month, called VentureX. By the end of 2012, Kuegler thinks Wasabi could have a permanent Baltimore office.

Kuegler traces his own entrepreneurial streak to his early years attending public schools in Essex, where he sold candy to classmates for a profit and ran — and then sold — a landscaping business. He and a partner started a Web development business in the mid-1990s, and he’s been involved in the Internet economy ever since.

The Baltimore Sun caught up with Kuegler during one of his recent visits.

Why do you keep coming back to Baltimore?

I still think of Baltimore as home, even though I haven’t lived [here] in almost 20 years. I love the city. My parents still live in the area. From a business standpoint, about three years ago I started getting active at Loyola. They kind of hunted me down and asked me to be more active. Not only do I give money, but we take on [Loyola] interns. We’ve taken on about 100 interns from Loyola in the past three years.

What are some attributes of Baltimore’s technology community that you see?

There’s a growing kernel of a startup community. It’s a kernel, but it’s getting there. I think Baltimore is very ripe for a renaissance in startups. It has a lot of things that can make it great. It’s got decent schools, a fairly low cost of living. It’s got close proximity to D.C. There’s a lot of things that could make it crazy successful. But it’s going to take time and energy, and a willingness to sweat to make it happen.

Tell me about the kinds of companies you’re interested in funding in Baltimore.

We’ll probably do five startups in the Baltimore metro area [in the first quarter of 2012]. We’ll probably do an announcement in January of the five. They’re a little bit all over the place. … One is a B2B [business-to-business company] and there are a couple B2Cs [business-to-consumer companies]. None of them are in cybersecurity or government.

How is launching an Internet company different now than, say, the mid-1990s?

When I first got into the business, Internet startups would cost you so much. [Web] hosting alone would cost you thousands a month. Now you can stretch dollars a long, long way. Prototyping and launching can be done so cheaply now.

You’re active all over the East Coast in looking at opportunities for investment. How does Baltimore compare to larger markets, like New York and Boston or Silicon Valley?

Most of the people we fund don’t have any revenue and, heck, they don’t even have a prototype. In almost all [investments in startups], we’re putting in talent, not just money. It’s almost like dating. It’s more important that we like the founders and the founders like us.

How big is Wasabi’s typical investment in a company?

It’s usually in the $10,000 to $50,000 range. We’re usually not leading someone who is trying to raise a half-million dollars. Our involvement is more from an incubation and acceleration standpoint — that way our investment gets multiplied. We don’t take cash for our services; we take equity or a convertible note.

So many people think they can’t do an Internet startup because they don’t have a computer science degree or much technical knowledge. What’s been your experience with technical and nontechnical founders?

It might be around 40 or 50 percent of our founders are nontechnical. Some of our most successful startups are not founded by engineering-based people. I have this premise that startup entrepreneurs, they exist all over the United States, all over the world. And they didn’t have to go to Stanford or get a computer science degree. It’s inside all kinds of people.

How do you and your startups measure success?

One of the things that drives me crazy about the startup world is: What’s wrong with building successful companies that are fun to run? Fifty years ago, entrepreneurs didn’t sit around wondering what their exit was going to be. As long as they’re cash flow-positive, what’s the hurry to get an exit? Traditionally in our history as a country, nothing was greater than building something for your children to run. But have you ever heard of an Internet venture being passed onto someone’s kids?

What skills or attributes do you look for in a startup founder that you hope to invest in?

I have very distinct criteria. Because we’re in that early stage, often the idea doesn’t matter. The idea is never 100 percent right. It’s about adaptability. Can the founder listen to what the market wants? Some of the most successful … companies we’ve ever had [were firms whose] first product was completely wrong.

At an event not too long ago, while I was on a panel, someone asked me, “what is the one thing entrepreneurs need to be successful?”  My answer was “sweat.”

I always fall back on this answer when I am asked that question.  Because nothing is more important for a startup than the hard work and long hours of the founding entrepreneurs.  But when I answered it this time it made me think of something else.   Sweat is absolutely necessary for success, but this has to be coupled with the ability to adopt what you are learning while you are sweating away.  The best entrepreneurs are open-minded while they are putting in the countless hours and are willing to adjust their boundless energy to make their venture a success.

So answering the inquiry about attributes opened my mind to a new answer to that question.  Yes, it takes lots of sweat to be successful, but flexibility has to be accompanied with that energy.   Bottom line is that to make your startup successful you need to work crazy hard and be 100% ready to adjust to what you learn along the way.  That is what I did in re-thinking the way I answer this oft-asked question.

About the author: Tom “TK” Kuegler is a managing partner with Wasabi Ventures.

Have I gained perspective since then?  Of course. Then again, what I wrote in that post is still very much a part of my current experience:

Entrepreneurship means taking on [paying] work in which you have no interest while you slave away on something uncertain about which you are passionate. It means answering work emails when you come home at two in the morning after a night out. It means explosions of creative energy when you’re out running errands that you frantically try to record on your cellular telephone. It means running through your plan for the next day as you lay down to sleep; then again in the morning as you’re getting up. It means adapting to work on other people’s schedules to make use of their unique talents. It means sending your outsourced developers a whole week’s worth of work on Sunday because combating the time difference all week would lose too much time. It means trying, succeeding, failing, and retrying — often all in the same day.

I can certainly understand why this life isn’t for everyone.  Startups have a way of draining you even when you feel truly passionate about the business — and often times you will have to do stuff that has nothing at all to do with “passion!”

Then again, there are those moments that make it all worthwhile.  You might think that you’ll have to wait until a company sells, or at least begins turning a steady profit.  But there are many, many little moments waiting for you that will give you the “entrepreneur’s rush.”  Accomplishing a business goal, even a small one, is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

I think that while most entrepreneurs decide to go into businesses for themselves for various different reasons, most of them actually keep at it because of this feeling.

Most recently, I experienced the entrepreneur’s rush as the Back to School Giveaway, something I’ve been working on for the past two months, surpassed 100 entrants.  That was on Thursday of last week.  By the time this post goes live, I have no idea how many we’ll have.  Hundreds, hopefully.

The thought that something I created is getting so many educators excited and will help so many students is truly satisfying — even if 100+ entrants is unimpressive to other people.  It really is quite a rush.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

That’s BS.  Success is hard.

Success isn’t about raising money or getting a high valuation.

It’s about building a business that delivers a great product to happy customers.

Every great business started as an entrepreneur with an idea, no product, and no resources.  Hundreds of thousands of well-educated, highly qualified people each year set out from that starting point.  And only about 100 manage a life-changing liquidity event.

Many people think that I’m successful.  I won’t argue the point, but I will note that I’ve been doing startups since 1995, and every single one has been hard.  Some have succeeded.  Most have failed, or at least failed to make a major impact in the world.

If I were to start a company today, despite all my relationships and my minor notoriety (in the words of comedian Greg Fitzsimmons, I’ve spent decades clawing my way up to the middle), I would still estimate my chances of success at well less than 50%.  That’s because success is hard.

But remember this: Even though success is hard and the chances of success slim, there’s a 100% chance you’ll never experience the joy of a successful startup if you don’t try.

About the author: Chris Yeh is a managing partner with Wasabi Ventures.  Follow him on Twitter or read his blog.

With startups, however, people are far more concerned with simply getting results and growing their businesses.  Why?  Because in most cases the company is exactly that — their business.  They’re doing what they’re doing not so much for a paycheck but because they are passionate about the industry.

I have joked before that you never see such a vast collection of “passionate” people as on Twitter.  You only get 160 characters for your bio, and yet you would be amazed at how many people choose to tell followers that they are “passionate about X, Y, or Z.”  I used to take a rather cynical view of this, thinking that these are just people with a Twitter account for work that don’t want to say, “I get paid to tweet about this…”

But the more I use Twitter, the more I see that it can be very true.  Many of these small businesses have Twitter accounts run by the business founders for the express purpose of participating in conversations about their industry and meeting others like them.  For these “genuine Tweeters,” social media can be a very powerful thing.  It drives business and often forms bonds that then become important collaborative projects.

In short: while large companies tend to want to keep all others at a distance, startups and small businesses generally seek out ways to create synergies.  Credit be damned — we want results!

A great example of this is my current project with TestSoup: the Back to School Giveaway.  It’s a team of six educational technology (edtech) companies that have banded together to give away $150,000 worth of premium edtech resources to schools this year.

I would never have met these companies if TestSoup hadn’t co-sponsored a Tweetup at the ISTE 2011 conference in Philadelphia this past summer.  But now that I have met them (and worked with them, to a limited extent), I’m fully confident that we can all find ways to help each other out and, more importantly, make some positive change in the educational scene — even a small one.  That is what it’s all about, anyway.

If you have a moment and you’re at all involved in the education industry, please take a look at the Back to School Giveaway homepage and check out the companies TestSoup is working with.  They’re well worth your time.  And, if you happen to be a teacher (or know a teacher) who may be interested in a load of free edtech content, feel free to sign up and spread the word.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

Contrast this to the state of affairs at most large organizations, where as an employee, you’re ability to get results will only pay off if you combine it with a (brown) nose for getting credit for those results.

Owners don’t have to give themselves performance reviews and raises. They grow the damn business and take all the profits.

Which approach would you prefer to take?

About the author: Chris Yeh is a managing partner with Wasabi Ventures.  Follow him on Twitter or read his blog.

Back in the day, banks used to signal to their customers that they were “here to stay” with marble edifices and elaborate interiors.  An investment in a structure like that signaled to people that this was a place they could trust with their money.

In the days of the internet business, however, that sort of thing is practically impossible.  Sure, you can invest in a “professional looking” website, but that doesn’t mean much.  Compared to an ornate marble façade, even the fanciest of websites can be had for a song and dance, and thanks to easy-to-use platforms like WordPress, almost anyone can have a perfectly respectable web page without spending any money at all.

Still, the pressure to seem like you’re already a success is ever-present in the startup world, causing many small businesses to hide behind a wall of professionalism and erect the internet equivalent of a phony marble entryway.  How?  By acting like they have more employees than they really do, by writing copy text with the same voice as “the big guys,” or by just generally putting on a show about everything.

Don’t get me wrong.  There is a huge difference between publicizing your business’ operations and “putting on a show.”  Publicizing is okay — in fact it is downright necessary.  But if you try too hard to seem like an old hand in your industry then you miss out on the opportunities that come with being a small company.

Big companies understand that there’s a good reason to not seem like a greedy corporate entity.  They take steps all the time to seem more down-to-earth or quirky.  Take a look at the current marketing strategy from Old Spice to see what I mean.  That company has been around since before WWII, and yet they’re trying very hard to seem funny and hip.  Why?  Most likely because they have lost massive market share to Axe (launched in the US after 2000), which does this quite naturally.

Startups have something that many big companies have lost a long time ago: authenticity.  Most startups were created by a few people who cared so deeply about something that their only logical course of action was to open a business.  That enthusiasm is what will carry them through hard times and what will allow them to distinguish themselves from the big guys, who may have lower prices but a less-specialized product or service.

There is more than one way to signal to potential customers that your business is here to stay.  Mimicking the big guys may seem like a tried and true method, but be careful!  You’ll find yourself playing by their rules and on their turf.

Instead, let your passion for your work show.  Write regularly for your blog.  Interact with your fans or followers via social media.  Respond to emails with a personal touch.  And don’t be afraid to give out your phone number.

These sorts of things are very difficult for a big company to manage simply because they are already pulled in so many different directions.  But for a startup, they usually don’t take up too much time each day at all.  And, of course, they could make all the difference when you’re landing your first big client or seeking that all-important second round of funding.

If you’re reading this thinking, “I’m already pulling 12 hour days — how on earth am I going to find the time to do that?”  Don’t despair!  There are literally thousands of college graduates out there who would love a job creating and managing the public face of your small business.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

Then again, perhaps this is only natural when you get any group of people who are passionate about some common thing together in the same room.  This is what I imagine businessmen are talking about when they go on and on about “synergy.”  They want to leverage that passion, and all the bright ideas that come with it, into a strategy that they can use.  Something concrete.

No doubt, these types of meetings — we called it “the WV Summit” — can be enormously beneficial.  Just from a moral perspective, this was huge.  Most of us had never met before, and putting a face (and a voice) to a name that we were used to seeing only in our email address boxes made the work on our various startups seem more worthwhile; more human.

Bigger than that, though, and bigger than all those great ideas, was the discovery of all the ways that the various assembled companies could help each other.  Many startups find themselves embarking on a quest to reinvent some kind of wheel.  Sometimes this is necessary.  Indeed, sometimes it is an essential part of that company’s raison d’etre.  But those situations are rare, or at least rarer than you might think.

It’s easy to get caught up in your startup’s day-to-day.  Everything seems both significant and unique.  But the book of Ecclesiastes had it right in its lament: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”  A few short hours in a conference room elicited all manner of miniature collaborations that could be made between the four companies in attendance.  There were marketing strategies that could be adapted and reused, business processes that could be mimicked, and small projects that could be undertaken together for shared benefit.

Of course, the key to all of this is follow-up.  One of the first things we discussed at the summit by way of preface was that almost all ideas are bad ideas.  There are millions of businesses that seem to beg to be created on a daily basis.  Some of them may even be worth money — a lot of money.  But without follow-up (and a lot of late nights) they are worthless.  They distract you from other profitable pursuits.

In other words: even good ideas turn bad if you don’t develop them.  Try them out.  The market will tell you’re on the right track fairly quickly, and then you can change course if necessary (and, more than likely, it will be necessary).  The important thing is to put yourself out there, or else you’ll never know what the market thinks.

Think of the market as a very, very large company meeting.  There’s a lot of good ideas out there; a lot of intelligence.  Launching a business and keeping your ear to the ground is akin to organizing a startup summit and showing up with a notepad, a pen, and your listening cap.  Then you rinse and repeat.

If it sounds like an exhausting process, I must confess that it can be.  That’s why it is absolutely essential not to reinvent any wheels that don’t need reinventing.  Listen to your allies — you always have many more than you think.  And, of course, never miss an opportunity to let them work for you.  Just remember that every partnership is a two-way street.

About the author: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.

First of all, I must say that I was a little skeptical about this book when I picked it up.  Sure, I did want to learn how to “leverage resources, establish online credibility, and crush my competition,” (the book’s subtitle), but the endorsements on the back cover made it seem more like a “get rich quick” guide than a useful resource for someone like myself, who wants to know how to honestly increase his online presence.

Still, I made a cup of tea and started to read.  I had finished part one before my tea had cooled, and I already knew that my initial skepticism was way off the mark.  And I was already making plans to re-read the book more slowly and pay far more attention to the action item lists Schwerdtfeger includes at the end of each two-to-four-page chapter.

I will caution you that reading this book the way I did (as if it were any other book) is not the optimal way to absorb the material.  You may get some great ideas for things that you can do immediately for your business, but you will miss the bulk of the material.  There’s very little fat on this book.  It reads like a series of blog posts, each with (at least) one thing you should do to market yourself and your business.  Some of these things are simple and can be done in an afternoon.  Others may take months of effort.

You may not be able to do everything in this book, but you definitely should start doing certain things right away.  For this reason, I must reiterate that this is not a book to be read just once.  Sure, go ahead and tear through it.  Revel in the incredible amount of helpful hints, useful links, and brilliantly simple ideas.  Take note of a few key things you want to improve right away.  Get psyched to build up your brand.  Go take action.

Then come back to the book and read it again, slowly this time.  Don’t go on to the next chapter until you have made some real progress on the one you just read.  Try to really get something out of it, because there’s certainly a lot to be gotten from Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed.

About the reviewer: John J. Walters is a freelancer with WasabiVentures, director of marketing with TestSoup, and a research associate with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.