My experience with startup competitions

To preface this, I am an indie hacker. I am a bootstrapper. I have never had a VC funded startup and I don’t really plan to create one in the future. Might happen, probably not though. So my experience with startup competitions comes from a place of “exposing” myself and my idea to a panel of industry experts, getting feedback, getting connections and maybe somebody wants to give me money someday. But that’s not really the point for me.

Where I participated

When creating my story drafting software “Draftical” from 2019 - 2022 I took part in two competitions. First was Kreativsonar 2021 and the second one was Saarland-Accelerator. Unfortunately for my english readers, you might have to google-translate those sites, they are german competitions.

For Kreativsonar, you were able to sign up when your product had anything to do with the creative working industry, i.e. say journalists, authors, writers, bloggers, artists and their surrounding bubble. You could win a guerilla marketing workshop weekend and were introduced to potential accelerator programs, funding opportunities and business partners. A great deal, as you only had to show up once and had to talk about your idea with three different panels of industry experts, VC people, business leaders etc.

For Saarland Accelerator (funded by government, explicitly for our german state), getting accepted would have meant that my startup would go through a round of mentoring, workshops, preparation meetings to then in the end go in front of a large audience and present the idea to potential investors and partners. To sign up, you had to present to - it was 2021 mind you - an online audience of just those people and more experts, marketing people, leaders and so forth.

Kreativsonar

The competition that meant more to me, maybe that’s in hindsight not sure. I was excited to go on, my presentation was great. On the day, I felt a little sick, having gotten my first Covid shot the day before, so it became more challenging then planned.

The experts you presented to were very interested in the idea, but they also dug deep to find the questions you were not able to answer. I’ve had a lot of challenging questions in the three rounds, giving me great opportunity to see what I had not figured out about my startup at this point. A great experience, while terrifying at the same time.

We did not win this one. Not a big deal, not everyone can win and my idea was early days. I got the opportunity to talk about why I didn’t win with the organiser of the event. So I took that opportunity and scheduled a meeting. Get as much feedback as you can.

In this meeting, I got a rather strange reason for why I didn’t win though. In one of the three presentations somebody asked me the question:

“What’s the best thing you can imagine for this startup? Like the scenario where you are very happy with how it’s gone and where you want to continue?”

For me, this was a no brainer. My answer:

“I imagine at that point we are at, maybe 5000 users. At our price point that gives the company enough room to hire 1-2 developers to. help me, somebody for marketing and somebody for the business side. From there, we can see where we can grow the business and work on it full time.”

Seems reasonable. The feedback was, that people wanted to hear something like this.

“I’d like to take this company to at least 1.000.000 users. At that point we can push it internationally, become a leader in story drafting software and make our investors a 10x exit at some point.”

Okay. I’m not interested in day dreams, I’m interested in building a sustainable company that gives me the opportunity to stop working for other people and only work for myself, my employees and my users. I was kinda let down by this feedback and thought about this for a while after still. I came to the same conclusion I just presented you with.

I would still go back with another idea which we might actually do with Schreiberling.app. Getting valuable feedback and prodding, hard to answer questions was worth the effort.

Saarland Accelerator

We didn’t get far here either. I presented the idea online. I had some prodding questions. But my impression was, that nobody really cared for the idea.

I can only assume here, as I didn’t get much feedback. I think that the nature of the idea, creative industry, with users that don’t have much money to begin with, might not have been their favorite thing ever.

With a different idea, that is more akin to a standard Silicon Valley software startup, I would consider going there again. Might just not have been the correct event for us.

What now?

With Schreiberling, we have the opportunity to revisit competitions like this. And we actually do so as well! Right now, we are entered in the 1,2,3 Go competition, which is a competition funded by the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Again, a lot of networking opportunities, getting asked hard questions. We also benefit from a big list of free workshops teaching marketing, sales, taxation and all the good stuff you need to worry about with your business.

We’re also contemplating entering Kreativsonar 2023, as Schreiberling is another idea that is close to the creative writing industry. Maybe I’m creating a bigger vision this time 😉 Will update you guys when I know more there.

What to focus on

In competitions, a lot of people look to entering the competitions with the biggest cash prices. I’d give you advice that’s a little different. Look for competitions where you are exposed to a lot of experts, business leaders, marketers, people with connections. Just entering a few of those competitions, we have gotten great connections to businesses that might be interested in becoming sparring partners, customers, investors. That’s the thing you should be looking for. Money will come either way. It’s also more in line with the bootstrapping approach, as we can just get our first users for our business that way and go up from there.

So in conclusion. Even though most indie hackers and bootstrappers keep to themselves and might not be interested in competitions. Maybe try out one or two. You can get valuable feedback, some exposure for your business and there might even be one guy or lady that says “You know what, I have a brother who works for COMPANY, they would really like to hear about this.”

And that one sentence might change the trajectory of your entire company.

Try it out.

It’s fun.