When I left off, we had a deposit down in Texas and a number hanging over us that I had not said out loud to anyone.
We could not afford to finish the order.
That was the truth. The deposit got the machines moving, but it was a down payment on a much bigger bill, and the rest of that bill was real money we did not have. A hundred-plus people had already paid us for a product that was now literally being manufactured. If we could not come up with the balance, we did not have a cash flow problem. We had a hundred promises we were about to break.
And the only plan we had to close it was a stage.
By the time we finally pulled into the hotel, we had been on the road for the better part of twenty-six hours. New Jersey to Texas, straight through, running on gas station coffee and nerves. Most people, after a drive like that, would have fallen face-first into the bed. We dropped our bags and immediately started prepping, because the semifinals pitch was the next day and it was the only thing standing between us and the money we needed.
We were not doing it alone. Our mentor, Nathan Butorac, was a huge help in forming our story around what the competition focused on... demonstrating value beyond revenue. I will say this plainly: the pitch we delivered at semifinals the next morning is probably, to this day, the best pitch we have ever given. Everything we had learned in a year and a half of walking into rooms came out in those few minutes.
Then we finished, and we exhaled, and we had absolutely no idea if it was enough.
Here is the part nobody warned us about. We did not find out whether we had made the finals ahead of time. The way it worked, all the semifinalists got called into an auditorium, and the finalists were announced one at a time by being called up to present, live, right there. So we sat in that room watching team after team get called to the front, doing the quiet math on how many spots could be left, not knowing if our name was coming or if we had already been passed over.
It was one of the most nerve-racking things I have ever sat through.
And then, right before they broke halfway through the presentations, we heard it.
"+Pouch, from Rowan University."
The timing could not have been better. It gave us about five minutes to catch our breath, talk with the judges, and actually get comfortable on the stage before we launched in. So we presented. And the feedback from the judges was tremendous. But there is one moment I will never forget.
They had time for one last question in the Q&A. A judge leaned in and asked, "Who else is doing this?"
The answer was nobody.
You could watch it land. In that one question and that one word, the whole room understood the size of what we were chasing, that we were not a nicer version of something that already existed, we were going after a gap nobody else had stepped into. We walked off that stage feeling like we had made them see it.
Then came the awards ceremony, and I would be lying if I said the confidence carried through. Our nerves were absolutely there. We knew exactly what was on the line, and exactly what that prize could do for a company sitting on a production run it could not yet pay for.
They worked their way down to the final three.
And here is the thing about the final three. Third place was ten thousand dollars. So it was simple, and it was brutal. Ten thousand dollars, or we went home with nothing.
Then they said our name. Third.
The only way I know how to describe the feeling is validation and relief, at the exact same time, so hard it almost knocked the wind out of me. Validation that everyone who had bet on us, the strangers, my grandparents, Nathan, was right. And relief, pure relief, because that ten thousand dollars was almost exactly the balance we owed on the order. The gap I had not said out loud. Closed. On a stage. In the one month we could not afford to come home empty-handed.
We did not raise a round to make our first product. We did not max out cards or find an investor to swoop in. We drove twenty-six hours, we prepped in a hotel room until it was right, and we earned it in front of judges deciding whether we were for real. Family got us to the starting line. That check at TCU Neeley School of Business got us across it.
We finally had what we needed to make this a real thing.
So that is where I will leave it. Order funded, product on the line, and three more competitions still ahead of us that month.
More of the story soon.
Braeden, +Pouch