Approachable, a branding, and marketing agency, held its first online seminar for the Houston startup and innovation community this week, focusing on how early-stage founders communicate their companies to investors, customers, and media.

The session, titled "The Death of the Elevator Pitch," was hosted by Approachable founder Kitric Kerns and centered on a concept the agency calls the One Breath Test, a framework for distilling a company's identity and value into a message that can be delivered in a single breath. The seminar walked founders through common messaging mistakes, including over-explaining a product's features and leading with credentials rather than customer understanding, and introduced a brand-script method for turning a company's story into a clear, repeatable pitch.

Kerns said the seminar addressed a recurring problem he sees among founders.

"Founders fall in love with everything their company does, and that love gets in the way of being understood," Kerns said. "Most fall into one of two traps: leaning entirely on their resume, or leaning heavily on their product's feature set. Neither shows the empathy needed to actually drive brand engagement. Authority proves you can. Empathy proves you understand. The goal of this seminar was to give founders a simple test they can apply immediately, so the next conversation they have about their company actually lands."

Kerns pointed to a shift in attention spans as the reason the exercise is built around a single breath rather than a full elevator ride. Where a thirty-second pitch was once considered concise, Kerns said most people now form an impression in about seven seconds, a shift he attributes to doom-scrolling which has shortened the window audiences give any message before moving on. That same seven-second standard, Kerns said, now applies well beyond in-person pitches, shaping how people read a company's website, social posts and pitch decks.

The seminar was delivered online through Skyler Network, a community platform built to help organizations host and grow engaged audiences without advertising and without surrendering ownership of that audience to a third-party platform. Unlike social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn, where a company's followers and data ultimately belong to the platform, Skyler Network allows organizations to build and retain direct ownership of their community.

Skyler Network CEO Ron Sasson attended the seminar and highlighted the platform's ability to create fully customized event experiences quickly. The meeting page for Approachable's seminar, designed around a campfire setting in Yosemite Valley, was built in a matter of minutes.

"Storytelling is one of the oldest ways people connect, so it made sense to put founders in a setting built around exactly that," Sasson said. "We wanted the room itself to reinforce the message Kitric was teaching, and the platform let us do that without weeks of development. Kitric was able to stand up a dedicated Approachable community, set up and promote the event itself, and now he can stay in touch with everyone who attended, all from the same place."

The pairing of subject matter and setting was intentional. Approachable's seminar focused on narrative-based brand messaging, and the choice of a campfire environment was meant to underscore that companies, like people, are remembered through the stories they tell rather than through lists of features or credentials.

Attendees included founders and operators from across the Houston startup and innovation ecosystem, spanning industries such as healthtech, proptech, and enterprise software. Several participants took part in a live exercise during the session, applying the One Breath Test to their own companies in real time and receiving feedback from Kerns.

Approachable plans to offer the seminar again in August, with additional sessions on branding and social storytelling planned for later in the year as part of an ongoing series aimed at the Houston startup and innovation ecosystem.

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For more information about Approachable, contact the company here:

Approachable
Kitric Kerns
kitric@approachable.agency
The Ion
4201 Main St, Houston, TX 77002