Concept to Creation, Chapter 9: Redemption

When I left off, we had third place at TCU, ten thousand dollars, an order that was finally funded, and three more competitions still in front of us that month.

The next one was the one that mattered differently.

The Rowan New Venture Competition is where this whole thing started. It was our first pitch, our first real room, the first time we said the idea out loud to people whose job was to poke holes in it. And the first time, we did not make it out of the semifinals. We went home before the finals even happened.

So walking back into that same competition a year later was not just another comp on the April calendar. It was a redemption round.

And this time we were prepared.

We had been practicing the pitch for weeks. Not reading it, practicing it, the way you practice something until you no longer have to think about the words and can just think about the person you are saying them to. Then semifinals came, the exact round that ended our run last year, and honestly it felt like a rehearsal. We were not hoping to make finals. We expected to.

We did.

Now, you might be reading this and thinking that a competition open only to Rowan students cannot be that tough. You would be wrong, and I want to take a second on that, because the two people who beat us deserve their names in this.

Nick Denzer is building a platform that matches pharma companies with CDMOs and makes the whole process seamless for both sides. It is a genuinely hard problem and he is doing phenomenal work on it.

Maya Hagan is building a skin-safe sanitizing mist for hands and face. Both of them are real ventures with real thinking behind them. So we knew going into finals that this was not going to be easy.

We ended up pitching first.

And it was the closest thing to flow state I have felt on a stage. Every hour of those weeks of practice showed up at once. We did not fight the pitch, we just delivered it. When we walked off, there was nothing I wanted back.

We placed third. Right behind Nick and Maya.

Here is the thing, though. That was a win for us, and not in the participation-trophy sense. It was a win because it was the cleanest before-and-after we will ever get. Same competition, same building, one year apart. Last year we did not make finals. This year we placed third in them. Last year we walked in with an idea and hope. This year we walked in with 317 pre-orders, a funded production run, a manufacturer in Texas, and a pitch we could deliver in our sleep. The scoreboard said third. The comparison said everything.

You do not usually get a control group for your own growth. We got one.

I have to thank the Rowan Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, because they gave us the opportunity that started all of it, and they kept giving us the room to come back better. Shawn Hill, Jessica Vattima, Michael T. Dominik, Ph.D., Neal Lemon, and most importantly Bill Goodwin: the guidance we got from you shaped how we think, not just how we pitch. Thank you.

It has been a genuinely crazy year, and that one side-by-side sums it up better than anything else I could write.

So if you have that idea sitting in the back of your head, the one that keeps you up, chase it. A year from now you could be standing in the same room with the receipts.

This is your sign.

Two competitions left. E-Fest to close out April, then Hult Prize in Boston at the beginning of May. And then the part everybody actually wants to hear about: shipping.

More of the story soon.

Braeden, +Pouch