And so we have finally reached the end of the journey.
It was a surreal experience, everything culminated to this day. And this day provides not only the chance to pitch to 3 people (and probably the audience), but also a test of my presentation skills.
Coming from an "incredibly fast speaking" country, time and again was I reminded how people could not catch whatever I was speaking. My enunciation was commented on even during the mock pitch to Ken at CET which was just a few days earlier. Hence I was pretty conscious of this and worked to address this problem.
And during the 1.5 minutes of my own showtime, I hoped the audience was able to catch everything that I wanted to say. I received some positive feedback from some friends in the audience, and I am proud of it.
Thinking back, there are some key lessons picked up from today's event:
1. Do not attempt to memorize your scripts. Chances are that you will forget some lines, and once you do your mind will automatically freeze. Instead, remember key points and just trust that your mind will be able to automatically arrange a script for you.
While preparing for my 1.5 minutes of fame, I learnt this lesson the hard way during my practice runs. It felt too rigid and I felt stuck at times. Hence I tried the 'keyword' approach and it felt better. One problem with the 'keyword' approach, is that one may tend to over elaborate or engage in long-winded sentences. Such problems simply require lots of practice, and I am glad I was able to scrap through.
On hindsight, I liked how I challenged myself to speak while a video was running. This meant pacing myself with the video - I cannot mention points too early nor too late. I am really glad I was able to make it happen. Nonetheless, there were still some regions
2. Each pitching is different. When pitching to VCs, they are primarily more concerned with the business aspects, whether the market is suitable for investing. Having a proof-of-concept model helps to convince them the functional viability of the product, but having a good business proposal convinces them of the business viability of the product.
I felt that, while my video was nice, it wasn't particularly targeted at VCs? My video would apply better as a marketing pitch to would-be consumers though. Xpesum probably got a lead on us because their business viability was way more convincing than ours.
On hindsight, while I probably knew about this theoretically, I did not had a chance to experience this first-hand. Today's presentation showed me first-hand some ways how to be more "VC-pitch-friendly".
3. There is some truth behind "not more than 2 engineers in a team". Even though my team has only 3 people, and I did most of the coding job - which means there's only 1 "engineer" (my teammates also chipped in the coding job), I could empathize if there were 3 engineers. While having more engineers might allow for greater ideas, during the coding proper there might be clashes and stuff. And since usually only one person can be working on the prototype at any one time, having more than 3 engineers would just mean one engineer might have any significant contribution.
4. You have to believe in your product. I can't emphasize this even more. So much time and effort was spent in the semester trying to iron out what our product actually is and what it should do. We were torn between choosing the right market audience for our product, and how to even define 'right'. Technically, although our final product is still somewhat similar to the first idea we generated, there were several times during the year where I was certain that we kind of "pivoted" in our market audience. Nonetheless, I found such discussions useful. The good thing about having all 3 of us being friends means that we could talk things out unabashedly and we could be direct. This really helped in decision making. But once our decision was made, and once I was convinced in the product, that made selling the product and developing it much easier - since your heart and mind has believed in the viability of the product.
On hindsight, there were several times where I simply said "I'm fine with anything". That wasn't really a good thing and it added no real value to the team. I probably did that because I wanted the project to end, but in reality that meant I was trying to "cheat" myself. Luckily, the idea went in the correct direction that I wanted, and hence I didn't find myself doing a product that I didn't like.
These are probably the 4 main non-technical key points that I learnt (of course I definitely learnt much more in terms of technical skills).
Looking back, I am glad I was "forced" into this course.
