Crushpath raises $6M for a way to pitch your stuff

Social+Capital Partnership leads round, with participation from Charles River Ventures

Over the weekend, I was speaking to a painter on TaskRabbit, a site to find people to hire for simple tasks. Funny thing is, he didn't have a TaskRabbit page, website or Yelp page to showcase testimonials and referrals. I found myself wondering whether he could use something easier to set up to win new customers such as myself. Crushpath's new pitch sites could be just that.

Crushpath announced Tuesday morning that it's launched Pitch Sites as well as a Series A funding of $6 million to be the place for anyone (from professional salesmen to painters to physical trainers to mothers fundraising for their kid's pre-school) to pitch their stuff. The new funding was led by Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and managing partner of The Social+Capital Partnership, with participation from Charles River Ventures, which also led Crushpath's $2 million seed round. The seed also included Box CEO and founder Aaron Levie as well as Phil Hernandez of Marketo, and Dave Hersh, founder and former CEO of Jive Software.

"We're bringing the ability for everyone to sell," said Sam Lawrence, founder and CEO, and a former chief marketing officer at Jive Software, in an interview. "It's never been easier for people to be agents themselves... It's much cheaper to start a business so people are now asked to play some new-business role as part of their job." To this end, Crushpath hopes to help them put a better face on their pitches.

"Today, they're reaching out with an email, a long cold-call or a business card," Lawrence explained. "It's hard to tell your story [this way] and get it out that's digestable... with Pitch Sites, it's a simple elevator pitch."

Indeed, if you check out the pitch sites, they're a bit like About.me pages for a sale pitch meets LinkedIn profile page meets Facebook Pages.  

Since Vator started off as a way for a broad range of entrepreneurs to pitch (with the name Myelevatorpitch.tv as our first name), we truly appreciate this service. Crushpath is far more dedicated to helping anyone pitch any idea, or product, or service, and not just a company. And it's dedicated to helping the part-time salesman manage their sales on the backend. 

So what's so interesting about Crushpath? The nuance with this service is that a person can create pitches for any product. So unlike Facebook Pages, which is mainly for a company, and not a product, Crushpath's Pitch Sites are for campaigns. So if you're a personal trainer, you can have a pitch targeted to professionals that cost a certain amount and a pitch that's targeting stay-at-home moms.  

Today, the company has individuals at 6000 companies using its service. Companies range from small insurance agents to Fortune-leve companies, like Cox Communications, McAfee, said Lawrence. The type of users range from human resources and marketing people at large companies to small business owners. The service is free for two weeks, but then costs $9 per month for an unlimited number of pitches. 

On average, each account has about eight to 10 pitches.  

Crushpath launched in June 2012 with a service to help manage business relations, said Lawrenece.  "The original piece was the relational management piece," said Lawrence. 'What was missing was getting the interest in the first place."