Pitch Night Part 1: The Final Countdown

So the final week, Week 5, of the incubator program was on Saturday 17 October. Pitch night was four days later on Wednesday 21 October. Like the good uni students we are, we left everything to the last minute but not really because we were given that many days notice zzz

By the final week we had done a few problem interviews, however Rahul told us we hadn’t done enough. We also needed to create some traction for our idea to really impress the judges so we set out on a mission.

Kellen

Tuesday, day before pitch night, was HECTIC. We managed to line up 5 more teachers to interview to get some more market validation to put in our pitch. Lets just say it was a long day….

Our schedule:
9:00 Mentone Girls Secondary College
10:15 Toorak College
12:00 Mentone Girls (again)
1:30 Ringwood North Primary School
3:10 Sacred Heart Seconadry

I drove around 200km to get interviews with teachers. After that, we still had to work on making our pitch deck and practice our pitch. Lets also just say it was a long night….

Sing

Wednesday, day of pitch night, was also HECTIC. I don’t even know how to explain it. This week was also the final week of uni which meant a lot of assessments. Sing had a robotics project due the next day so I was working on the slides in his class while he was fixing his robot…like an hour before pitch night?

Also being the slightly enthusiastic person I am, I designed and made shirts for our pitch night with our slogan and logo. I had classes to attend and slides to finish, so during the last 15(?) minutes before pitch night I finished “sewing” on our pocket pots. Worth it though because I’m pretty sure we won best dressed on the night.

Kellen

While Kellen was finishing off the t-shirts, we enlisted the help of our friends to stick chocolates under the all the chairs in the room since we wanted to get the audience “curious” when we told them to check under their chairs and feel “the joy of discovery” when they found the chocolate. It turns out, it wasn’t as impactful as we first thought lol.

5 minutes before pitch night, we quickly ran through our pitch in front of our friends and they gave us feedback. It was lucky because in that little amount of time, we managed to refine our pitch to a decent standard. Our first run through was actually horrible. Stuttering, stopping, starting, speaking too fast, pacing around the room, the usual killjoys. Then it came to our pitch… part 2.

Sing

Read Weeks 4 and 5: StemEd
Read Week 3: Warm
Read Week 2: 1000 Dollars and a Bike
Read Week 1: Feels Week
Read the Beginning