It’s the final countdown(pitch)!

Leading up to the pitch, there were many factors to a startup that I had to think about and apply to my own business. Most importantly, I had to think about a revenue stream. For my platform, I wanted to find ways to establish my startup as a social enterprise which would require a revenue stream. The main revenue stream for gather is through corporate bodies, mainly through recruitment by job posting via gather and also corporate social responsibility. For these corporate bodies to be able to provide me with a revenue stream it is important for my startup to be able to equally present value to them. The value proposition that gather is able to guarantee is visibility to young talented girls in interested in STEM. 

I was also encouraged to investigate a go to market strategy. This component is not only an essential part to a successful startup, but it also helps convey for my pitch that I have really thought about the future and longevity of my startup. The first phase of implementation is to start within a university community by putting together opportunities from different clubs, faculties and university sanctioned events or scholarships, so the starting market will be female university students in a STEM field. Then, to reach out to corporate sponsors, where this will be our main form of revenue by offering visibility to students in STEM and we can add any of their opportunities or events to our platform. Finally, we will expand to volunteer programs and be able to cater to local schools and our market grows significantly by adding primary to high school students and then this implementation will be scaled. 

The last part of the pitch was for our ask towards the panel. I learnt that this ask does not have to stick to the traditional ask of funding from investors. As my startup is intended to be a social enterprise, this would be very difficult to pitch. Instead, I decided to ask for initial startup costs but more importantly for connections to potential sponsors, mentorship and guidance to continue to build my business. 

The process of preparing for the pitch has been the most pivotal part in developing my startup it really made me think about things that I would not have considered even from all the workshops, to be able to present a complete pitch. Preparing for the potential questions that would be asked and practicing with my peers then being questioned also allowed me to fill in any gaps in my knowledge or research I had not yet covered and raised any problems about the startup that I was not aware of.