Concept to Creation, Chapter 10: Ninety seconds for ten thousand dollars

When I left off we had placed third back home at Rowan, with the last stretch of April still in front of us.

Less than a week later we were on a plane to Minnesota.

E-Fest was the biggest room we had ever walked into. Fifteen minutes of pitching, then fifteen minutes of questions. If that does not sound like much, understand that Rowan and TCU were both a fraction of that. This was close to double the longest pitch we had ever given, and we had two nights to build it.

Our flight landed Thursday afternoon. The first leg of the competition was at six that night.

So I spent the entire flight writing a ninety second pitch.

That was the elevator pitch challenge, and the prize was ten thousand dollars. Ninety seconds. Ten thousand dollars.

I am going to say something that sounds backwards. The ninety second pitch is harder than the fifteen minute one. It is not close. In fifteen minutes you can breathe, you can build, you can earn a point before you make it. In ninety seconds you have to land the inspiration, the problem, the solution, and the traction, and you have to make a stranger care about all four before they have finished forming an opinion of you. There is nowhere to hide. Every word either earns its place or costs you the round.

That night was also when it hit me what kind of competition we had flown into.

Then I found out who we had drawn in the semifinals.

A company called BioMex, building a patented surgical mesh. Here is the part that made me sit back in my chair. The team behind it had been on Shark Tank a few months earlier with a different company and walked out with a deal. And they had just been acquired, days before we got there.

Days.

That was the level. Not students with a good idea. Founders with an exit.

By the time our semifinal came around, though, we felt good. We delivered the fifteen minutes close to perfectly, the best version of that pitch we had in us.

And then the best part of the whole thing started.

The Q&A was the hardest we have ever faced. Questions on our IP, on the physiology, on how the market would actually perceive what we were building. Not friendly questions. The kind that find the exact place you have not thought hard enough about and press on it.

It might be a cliche, but there is no better way to say it. There are levels to this.

We did not make it past semifinals.

We came home with four thousand dollars.

And honestly, the scoreboard is not the part I took home from Minnesota. It was the people. That week we were around some of the most talented student founders in the country, and a few of them are still in our corner now: Sam Mahannah, Dillon Rosenthal, William Zhao, and Mathis Fürst Haugen. We also got to watch two fellow Rowan students, Justin Iannelli and Harrison Nastasi, take second place with Bobica Bars.

That was all the motivation we needed.

And just like that, the craziest sprint of our lives so far was over.

Add up April. Four competitions, back to back. A deposit paid on a factory floor in Texas. Ten thousand dollars at TCU. Third place at Rowan. Four thousand more in Minnesota. We walked out of that month with our entire production order funded and money left over to put us in a genuinely good position. Not borrowed. Not raised. Won, in rooms full of people who had no reason to be kind to us.

Our tins were due to arrive in mid-June. We had the funding. We had mentors who had gotten us this far. We had three hundred and seventeen people who had already paid us and were waiting.

We thought the hard part was behind us.

It was not.

More of the story soon.

Braeden, +Pouch