The Final

Goal of the Final Presentation

In the last week of the class, we get to bring together everything we have learned and worked on throughout the semester via startup pitches to a panel of investors. This semester, we learned about ideation, customer discovery, problem-solution fit, market and sales strategies, business and revenue models, unit economics, and financial projections. It was a lot to fit into one semester but through actually walking through each step with our own startup ideas, we were able to really understand what each piece of the startup puzzle requires and the amount of time and energy that have to go into the logistics on top of the actual product creation. This final pitch gives us a chance to bring everything that we have learned together in one presentation and also allows us to practice pitching to investors.

Our Journey

As I worked with my team on creating a final presentation, I couldn’t help but think about how far we had come since the beginning of the semester: all the hurdles we faced and the pivots we made that led us to this final presentation.

We started with the innovative idea of crowdfunding for local businesses. For local businesses, this would act as a quick loan, while townspeople could invest their money in a way that would give them returns while also allowing them to give back to their communities. But upon doing customer discovery in Gate 1, we realized that this was an extremely complicated idea and enticing people to invest in local businesses that aren’t doing so well would prove to be difficult. This, in addition to the fact that our “CEO” who had previously thought of this idea had decided to drop out of the class, led us to feeling the need to pivot. As we neared the Gate 2 deadline, we realized that we needed to land on a solid idea so the remaining team members, Shreyas, Max, and I, met at Cafe Strada and went through nearly 20 different ideas before thinking about having a storage closet with common cleaning supplies in apartment buildings that can be loaned via a subscription service. However, our mentor was quick to shut us down on this idea and gave us the idea of just moving to a simpler portfolio management service whose value propositions would be guaranteed returns, thereby neutralizing the risk of investing. We took this idea and decided to run with it, especially given how close it was to the work we did in Gate 1.

Based on the comments from the professors and mentors during Gate 2 presentations, we decided to narrow our target market even more to college students, a population that wanted to start investing but did not have the knowledge to create high performing, low risk portfolios on their own.  We further refined this idea for our Gate 3 presentation where we created financial projections and tailored our marketing strategy to our new target market. 

Bringing Everything Together

Our journey has been long and not at all simple as we faced changes to our idea and to our team. But all of this brings us to today – bringing everything from all of these gates and all the work we did in the past together in one cohesive presentation, this time to a panel of investors. After our Gate 3 presentations, we were tasked with putting all of our material and research together to create a one-pager and a pitch deck for our startups to be presented to a panel of real investors. We will get the opportunity to not only hear new opinions from fresh eyes about our ideas but also get the chance to practice pitching and creating appealing presentations and one-pagers; skills that we will definitely need when we actually embark on our entrepreneurial journeys.

Takeaways from the Class

This is one of the few classes where I feel like I have genuinely learned a lot on one topic. Most classe focus on a only subsection of a topic, such as the class I took last semester on venture finance in which we only really learned about the topics covered in Gate 3. But in this class, we got to cover everything, which I believe was a valuable experience. We talked about:

1. Ideation and pitching preliminary ideas to our classmates.
2. Then we talked about customer interviews. We learned about problem-solution fit and making sure that our startup ideas were solutions to problems that people genuinely face.
3. From there, we moved into different marketing and sales strategies and growth opportunities. Here, it was important to define a business model so we looked at different types of revenue models that apply for different types of businesses.
4. Finally, we expanded on the finances of our businesses and made assumptions about costs and revenues and made 8-quarter and 5-year projections about where we see our businesses going and how we expect it to grow.
5. Lastly, we get the opportunity to actually pitch our ideas to investors. This is an invaluable experience that not many students get in a classroom setting, which is one of the things that I so appreciate about this class.

This class also taught me about the importance of leadership. When our leader left us right before our Gate 1 presentations, we stepped up to fill in his shoes and finish what we started. And when it came to the following Gates, I felt myself take on leadership by making sure everyone remembered our deadlines and creating the outlines for presentations and splitting up work amongst all of us. I feel that I have taken a major role of responsibility throughout this project, especially during Gate 3 as my team members had little experience with financial projections and venture finance compared to me. Also, given that we all left campus due to coronavirus, it made it a little bit more difficult to communicate and ensure everyone was doing their share, but we made it work in order to make, what I believe, will be a convincing final pitch.

I also want to thank the instructors and the mentors for everything they have taught us throughout the semester and all the time and effort they have put into helping us with our startups and presentations. I can definitely say I have come out of this class having learned a lot and am very thankful for that!

#ieor191 #finalpitches #entrepreneurship