We Pitched and we Lost

TLDR: Pretty much what the title says

The last few days have been quite exhausting. We put in a lot of effort into the pitch and we spent quite some time perfecting the transcript. But guess what? We did not have a pitch deck until the night before. And we only started practice a couple hours before the actual pitch. 

A day before the pitch (Monday, 8th July), we had a meeting with Phil- our coach at MCIC. He wasn’t eager to go through our transcript. He said something on the lines of ‘Doesn’t make sense if you don’t have a pitch deck’. True- we had to rework our transcript to match our slides. Some of the graphs were made on the day of the presentation. In retrospect, it was a mess. 

It would have been a bigger mess if we would have won with that pitch. The collective “whoa!” and the expressions of the judges, the claps after the presentation blinded us. I was sure that it went well- so many of my friends from the audience said that they loved it. 

But then this one friend comes up to me and says, “You guys had a nice presentation, but you went too fast. Also, you had too much content” (This was one of the several comments from my friends once I asked them). I was heartbroken when the results were announced because I was so sure it went well. We may have fumbled a bit but it was nice nevertheless. 

I watched the video of our pitch and quickly realised our shortcomings. I’ve since shown the video to some of my friends and asked for their inputs. My team and I also discussed what was good about the other presentations and what we could learn from them. 

See, we would have not paid much attention to our shortcomings had we won. To me, being an entrepreneur means being persistent, being resilient.