The final week of LABB program is upon us, such a bittersweet time full of late night presentation practicing and afternoon El Charro runs. This week was mostly focused on one thing, getting our App pitches ready for our final presentation on Wednesday, July 1st. The first two days we had no classwork so my whole group and I got together at the CIBE office in downtown Crawfordsville and hammered out every detail about our App. A little background about our app, it is a life organizational app that pushes you to accomplish and set more goals for your self, in its simplest form to explain it is x-box achievements for your life and an updating bucket list. The name of the app is LyfeGoals. On Monday we worked on flushing out of idea more, making sure that our presentation had everything we needed and that it was really clear what our app was. Tuesday was pretty much the same, but this time we putt together our PowerPoint, it took all afternoon, and later in the evening we re-grouped and practiced the presentation probably eight to ten times. By the time it reached eleven at night on Tuesday we had our PowerPoint together and were well practiced in what we were saying for our big pitch the next day.
The big day is here, it’s the day of or final pitch and the competition is fierce. We all arrive at the MXI around 8 and my group makes sure to squeeze one more practice in before we do our final presentation. The way these presentations works, is five judges from the Wabash community come and each have $50,000 to invest in whichever App they like the most. The can invest there money in which ever way they want, and our group needed some big time money to win. Our group ended up going second and the presentation went pretty well. We all did the best we could do individually, I think some of the questions we got asked were really tough and had no answer for which ended up hurting us a lot. Most of the questions we got drilled on were things about target market in advertising, which we didn’t have a lot of explanation for. After every group had gone the judges spent time privately deliberating on who should get the money. When they were done they all came out and gave us some feedback group by group. The biggest thing they said about ours was to make sure we know our audience and have compelling reasons to sell our app. We ate lunch and just like that, it was over. Thursday the 2nd was out last day, a bittersweet time. We all arrived at MXI and discussed what we did and didn’t like about the LABB program with Roland, and we also talked about how we think our presentations went the day before. We found out how much the investors put in each company, and our group only got $25,000 so we ended up tying for last with another group. A little disappointing, but we did our best. And just like that, we had turned in our iPads and the LABB program was over. Overall a great experience and something that really changed how I view business and entrepreneurship. I would like to take a moment to thank the generosity of the Lily Endowment which allowed me to participate in the LABB program.
