Launchpad, part 4: Revenue, not points
Week two: an elimination that turned into a revenue ranking, a pitch round down to five teams, and people giving away their day off.
Five teams are left. We’re one of them.
In week one everything here ran on points. Five points per post, twenty for a customer interview on video, twenty-five for a sale that comes out of an interview, plus trophies and challenges. And a leaderboard that moves all day.
The rules behind it are stricter than you’d think. An interview only counts if it runs at least 15 minutes, is on video and the person found us through our content. Sales to family, friends, other teams at camp or investors don’t count, and neither do discounts that only exist for the points. On elimination days, submissions close at 5 pm. If you misread the rules on the first night, like we did, you know them by heart after that.
Then the second elimination got postponed and rebuilt. In the end only one number counted: how much revenue each team had made during the programme. No posts, no interviews, no video. Whoever pays, counts.
After part 3, that felt almost logical to us. Vitalii’s line from Wednesday, that interviews are worth nothing if nobody pays, suddenly wasn’t a lesson anymore. It was the rule. We made it into the last ten teams.
The last round before demo day was a pitch. After it, five teams were left, and tomorrow we pitch to investors for the USD 100,000.
What I built this week looks pretty unspectacular from the outside. Kobe V3 and the desktop client kept shipping, release after release, so that every demo Nils runs holds up. Yesterday I built the pitch deck for tomorrow in Slidev, so as code instead of in a slide tool. 18 commits in one day. For an engineer that’s honestly the most comfortable way to make slides.
What I’ll take from this week most, though, is the other teams.
The teams that went out in the pitch round got a day off afterwards. And they gave it to the teams that were still in. One team came over right after their own elimination and said, more or less: we have a free day now, you’ll make better use of it, take our time. Lots of teams spent hours of their free time listening to the pitches of the last teams and giving feedback, ours included.
There was also a life outside the barn. Football with other teams, water skiing, cold plunges. By now I’m properly friends with a few people from other teams. It sounds like a school trip, and a bit it is, except everyone is building a company on the side.
In a competition where teams get sent home every week, that’s not a given. Pretty nice community feeling.
Tomorrow is demo day. Five teams, one pitch each.