Start-up competitions
For a small, non-software startup, one simple way to gain exposure, connection and even money is to enter into start-up competitions, lots and lots of them.
Our startup was no different.
Even in the midst of a power struggle in the company, we still entered into many different start-up competitions, either as a postgraduate students team or as the company. We entered into competitions like City I&T Grand Challenge, Elevator Pitch Competition (EPiC), Jumpstarter, Hong Kong Startup Express, among many others. We would usually do a little bit of research before entering, mainly to check if they were for students or very early start-ups to participate and secondly, to see what kind of prize they offered.
Some competitions like Jumpstarter would offer winners monetary awards and/or investment, while some offered selected participants the chance to meet investors and mentorship opportunities. These were all very appealing to a small startup like ours.
Armed with just a conceptual idea and a few renderings, we boldly entered these competitions. We were obviously not nearly good enough to win any of the competitions, but with our decent presentation skills and a strong technical background, we managed to get into the later stages in some of them and even won some small awards.
Maybe due to the sponsors of these events, one very common prize was cloud computing credit awards; we won a few thousand dollars worth of them. At that time, I really was not impressed. The cash flow of the company was slowly drying up, and these cloud computing credits meant nothing to me. As far as I was concerned, we did not need any cloud computing for our product, and I would gladly exchange the credits for a tenth of what they were worth in cash. Thankfully, we kept them.
In some of the competitions that we did well in, we even got invited to meet a few interested investors. Of course, we were not able to land any funding deals with any of the investors yet, but we managed to secure another government grant — The co-creation fund.
This funding was a direct reward for getting into the later stages of one of the competitions. Unlike a reimbursement grant, this time the fund would be sent to a bank account, and you would be able to use it for research and development and at a later stage, patents and marketing of your products. Like all other fundings, there would be restrictions and audits on the money spent, but at least we would not need to cough up money upfront for our research and development. This helped massively with our cash flow, and I would credit it for the rapid acceleration of the realization of our prototype.
After participating in a few competitions, we were invited to join a few accelerator programmes in addition to the incubation programme we were already in. We gladly accepted them, even though we were unsure how joining these accelerator programmes at that time would help our startup to grow. By then, the power struggle of the company has already been resolved, and we were eager to turn the page and move forwards with the startup.
