Four days. One prototype. A panel of jurors from one of the country’s best engineering schools. Here is what actually happened.
On 12 October I got an email from EDII-TN. Our venture had been shortlisted under the Innovation Voucher Programme, and we were invited to pitch live to a panel of jurors from IIT Madras. I read the email twice to make sure I had it right. Then I sat down and looked at the prototype we had been building, and I was honest with myself about what was wrong with it.
I had been working on this thing for months. I knew its strengths, because I had designed them. I also knew its weaknesses, because I had worked around them instead of fixing them. The shortlisting email gave me four days, and four days is long enough to fix a lot of things and short enough that I could not pretend any of them were minor.
I made two lists. Functional problems and presentation problems, separately. Functional: things that broke, things that were missing, things that did not do what they were supposed to do. Presentation: things that would confuse someone who had never seen the product before, things that would make the idea harder to understand than it needed to be. I did not sugarcoat any of it. The point of the review was to find the problems, not to defend against them.
Thirteen October: The Work Day
The next day I got to work. Core functionality first. If the thing did not actually do what we claimed it did, no amount of presentation polish was going to matter. I fixed the pieces that were unstable, made sure the demo path through the product was repeatable, and tested it over and over until it stopped breaking.
Then I started on the pitch materials. I wrote the Business Model Canvas from scratch. Then TAM, SAM, and SOM. Then the UVP, the USP, and the problem statement.
I had thought about these things before, loosely, in my head. I had ideas about who our customers were and what we would charge and why anyone would care. Writing them down properly is different. You cannot hand-wave your way through a TAM calculation on paper. Every number you put down has to come from somewhere, and if you do not know where it comes from, you have to say so. I said so in a few places. Those were the honest places.
Fourteen October: The Incubation Panel
The next day I presented to the incubation panel. Problem, solution, market relevance. I tried to be direct about what we were building and why it mattered to anyone besides me. I did not use buzzwords. I did not talk about disruption or scaling or the next big thing. I just explained what the product did and who it was for.
Fifteen October: Chennai
I travelled to Chennai on the fifteenth and pitched live to the IIT Madras jury. We were competing for Voucher A and Voucher B. I gave the live prototype demonstration, then walked through the BMC, the TAM/SAM/SOM, the UVP, USP, and the problem statement.
The jurors asked questions. Some were hard. Some were about the market, some were about the technical approach, some were about whether we had thought about a competitor I had not considered before. I did not have answers for all of them, and I did not pretend I did. I said what I knew and what I did not know, and I think that helped more than it hurt.
Afterward I met people from the wider innovation ecosystem. A few of them introduced themselves and said they would follow up. I have their names and I have not forgotten them. I received feedback from the jurors.