To celebrate our one year anniversary in participating in the Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition, BetterConnects wanted to take a trip down memory lane to reflect on our experiences. We hope that our first-hand experiences can be helpful to anyone interested in joining the competition and making their startup dreams become a reality.
What is SVBPC?
The Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition is a yearly event hosted by the Global Innovation and Leadership Department at San Jose State University (SJSU). Every year, teams with students attending or who graduated from SJSU register for the competition with the hopes of increasing their business connections and receiving helpful resources to make their business idea a reality.
Some students join the competition as a requirement for their business classes, while others do it to create their businesses. Regardless of the reason for registering, this competition helps participants evolve into better speakers and business leaders.
Why Did We Join SVBPC?
Since the BetterConnects team was still in its beginning stages, we had many reasons for wanting to apply to the competition. The primary reason would be receiving more funding for our product development journey. Although we got great feedback on improving our product through the Zinnstarter accelerator program, there were still many experiments we wanted to do to gauge user interest. We can only make more interactive prototypes and updates with more resources.
The secondary reason why we joined the competition would have to be getting advice from experts in Silicon Valley. Many working professionals and SJSU alumni enjoy giving back to the university, through serving as adjunct professors, donating to educational programs, or acting as mentors or judges.
With the vast connections in the epicenter of the tech industry, BetterConnects wanted to seize this opportunity to grow while savoring our limited time as college students. This was a sweet way to wrap up our undergraduate degrees.
Commentary on the Process of SVBPC
All teams had to submit a basic business plan (usually 25 pages) to summarize the business concept and communicate the steps of expansion to the judging panel.
Our team created a lengthy version of our business proposal. Entering this competition meant that the biggest challenges were condensing our idea down to an elevator pitch, filtering through our information to figure out what was still relevant to our mission, and brainstorming our long-term plans needed for expansion.
Having a newly established marketing team made it easier to put the pen to paper. We had given our marketing team all our resources, from designing our minimum viable product (or rough draft of our app) to even our competitive analysis, so that our team had the same understanding of our company vision. Weeks of writing, editing, and designing came into play to create our stellar reports and slide decks to present to our highly experienced judge panel and competition advisors.
Experience Presenting for SVBPC
Out of the 35 entries submitted for the Silicon Valley Business Competition, our team was fortunate to make it to the finals.
Finalists for the competition had to present in person at the Boccardo Business Center, home to SJSU’s Lucas College of Business. Our team meticulously went through the slide deck and our business plan over three days for a seamless presentation. We even met early in the morning on May 26, 2022, to rehearse and think of hypothetical questions coming our way.
By being the first team to present to the judges, our nervousness about pitching our idea went out the door. Our idea was fully fleshed out, with high reception from our audience of adjunct professors, venture capitalists, and well-known SJSU alumni. The questions we received revolved around the research for validating our competitive edge and the inner workings of our personality matching algorithm. We managed to convert our anxiety into excitement and impress the judges with our smooth presentation.
After presenting, it seemed that all the weight was lifted off our shoulders. We felt that we had given our 110% in expressing our passion and the need for such a platform.
Feedback from Judges
After presenting to the judging panel, we received the following suggestions to improve our business model for profitability and long-term success:
Focus on being a solution for shy people to find new friends. When you have their back, you are sure to go far.
At the time, our business focused on targeting college students that are always seeking new opportunities to make new friends and nurture their friendships. These people are extroverted and are willing to take on new risks so that they can have a great social life. One of the judges helped us come to a great “aha” moment: if you want to truly grow, focus on creating apps for shy people to meet new friends online.
Introverted people have a more difficult time when it comes to socializing. They’re shy and can also doubt their actions and words, which can prevent them from opportunities to make friends. This judge told us that catering to the needs of the introvert can lead to the best results. If we can help an introvert, we will have a loyal customer base that supports us and help with our word-of-mouth marketing efforts.
Make it clear that you are not another social network so that you don’t get confused with Facebook and Instagram.
We are trying to minimize the negative effects of today’s social media platforms. With that mission in mind, our app might be mistaken to replicate those platforms. This thought was also a concern with some of the other advisors watching us present since it was hard for them to understand this new business concept.
We are appreciative of the judges for pointing out this issue because it changed our elevator pitch and the wording in our marketing materials. For example, our website incorporates more metaphors to understand our matching feature and more research to emphasize the impact of modern social media platforms.
This piece of advice also inspired us to update all of our branding materials. We felt that our logo didn’t represent our company since it was created with an emphasis on creating conversations. Our platform is more than conversations; it’s all about creating and nurturing connections. Therefore, we did a brand revamp and changed our color palette, our tagline, and most notably, our company logo.
Think about how to keep users on the platform after the personality matching.
Our team entered this competition with a bare-bones concept. Our focus was put on acquiring new users, but not on how to keep them on the app. This part of the customer journey was still unclear to our judge panel.
Since joining the competition, we have brainstormed new features for users to stay on our platform after they’ve found their perfect match. We are currently working on different user workflows (or experiences) so that people can interact with each other and make new memories from joining BetterConnects.
Take more consideration of the payment processes since not everyone may be interested in paying for the platform.
As mentioned earlier, our target demographic is college students and recent college graduates. People in this demographic are doing their best to spend less money on items they don’t need, which can be a challenge for us to retain users.
This feedback from the judges made us change our payment tiers. We still want to implement payment features. However, we will be utilizing limited free features or trial periods for different features (including our personality matching services).
The Results
After hours of waiting and watching our competitors present to judges, we ended up placing fourth out of the eight finalists. We were just shy of receiving more financial resources for our business operations.
We may be disappointed that we didn’t rank higher. However, we left with a fiery passion to do better and prove that our idea can positively impact the way people utilize technology today. We are still proud of the work we presented to our judges and the fact that we competed against other amazing start-up teams. To be surrounded by people with the same goal of entrepreneurship and philanthropy made this a worthwhile learning experience.
Want to join our journey towards creating the personality matching platform for everyone? Sign up here to join as a tester or follow any of our pages for updates.
If you want to learn more about the Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition and how to join, you can click here.
