The Final Pitch By Gearóid McKendrick

 This week was the final week of the course and time for our final pitch. We were all busy preparing to present to esteemed guest such as Niamh Bushness the Start-up Commissioner, Geraldine Flynn the Head of Recruitment at Twitter and Gary Leyden Head of NDRC Launchpad, among others.

This week’s work

We were all focused on continuing with customer interviews in order to gain even more insights into their problems and solutions these problems. This helped us prepare for any questions that might be posed to us during our pitch.

Aisling presented on behalf of the group. This week she was busy practising and preparing the pitch whilst working on the financial figures for the business and updating our MVP video. Marie was writing posts for our blog and pulling together info about each team member for our ‘about us’ slide, while Claire was becoming a master app builder and putting the finishing touches to the prototype for ‘Giftitude’. I worked on the landing page slide for the presentation and pulled together the key insights from all our interviews on Launchpad Central.

This week, we were able to apply everything we learnt in our class with Andrew Keogh from Aristo and used his suggested layout for putting together our pitch. This was a great help in planning our approach.

The big day!

We began the build up to the pitching session by Tweeting about the event. Aisling set up a tweet screen in the venue which showed all Tweets using the hashtag #SmurfitStartup. As the guests arrived we found out that our pitch was first.

Aisling presented and done an excellent job. We were all very proud of her. The judging panel had some questions and comments – one of the main ones being how difficult it is to break into the SME market which is something we had discovered ourselves through our customer interview.

The other groups pitched and it was very interesting to see their progress and to hear the judges feedback and comments. After the class we had the opportunity to talk and network with all of the attendees. And that was the end of our journey. It was an amazing experience and each of us learned so much over the 12 weeks. We would like to thank Rohan, Ruiqi and Raomal for all their support during the semester and for all of their hard work the put into organising the final pitching event.