{"id":9869,"date":"2021-01-31T10:45:41","date_gmt":"2021-01-31T08:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dazzlepop.net\/site\/?p=9869"},"modified":"2021-02-15T13:23:56","modified_gmt":"2021-02-15T11:23:56","slug":"how-to-win-any-business-plan-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dazzlepop.net\/site\/how-to-win-any-business-plan-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Win Any Business Plan Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"How<\/div>\n

How to Win Any Business Plan Competition, From a 4-Time Winner<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Alison Alvarez<\/a> has gotten really good at understanding what judges want. Here are her top tips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alison Alvarez is a master of the\u00a0business plan\u00a0competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her expertise grew out of necessity. When she and her co-founder, Tomer Borenstein, founded BlastPoint in 2016, they knew they had a\u00a0winning business idea<\/a>: Leverage artificial intelligence to help\u00a0public utilities, banks, and automotive companies analyze<\/a> their massive customer lists. In their estimation, most data tools weren’t\u00a0built for salespeople\u00a0or others who might really benefit from them. Plus, the pair of computer scientists knew\u00a0their stuff–both had graduate degrees from Carnegie Mellon; Alvarez had also earned her MBA at the University’s Tepper School of Business.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But neither had financial resources. “Often you hear about the ‘friends and family round,'” comments Alvarez, referring to founders bootstrapping their companies by way of benevolent relatives. She wondered, “If you don’t have those, what do you do?” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alvarez and Borenstein decided to bootstrap the Pittsburgh-based BlastPoint through competitions and grants<\/a>. Alvarez viewed it as something akin to scholarship applications, which she had grown expert at as a student. She funded both her undergraduate and graduate educations with scholarships. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The strategy worked. In the past four years, the company has won four such competitions, ranging in size from 2017’s UpPrize, which came with a $160,000 reward, all the way to a small $2,000 payoff in the GVS Labs AI Pitch competition in 2020. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"How
How to Win Any Business Plan Competition<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“We got really good at that as a way to get capital for basic things,” says Alvarez. “Like, we need a printer, let’s go to a quick pitch competition,” referencing how she entered and won TiE Pittsburgh<\/a>. She notes an additional benefit of her business-competition funding strategy: “Investors show up.” At that point, she says, “it becomes less about the money, more about expanding our network,” which is key, especially when Covid-19 has made socializing normally so hard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, Alvarez shares a few the tricks she uses to prevail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ask to see the judging guidelines.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Competitions often try to make life easy for their judges, who tend to be high profile, busy, and donating their time, by providing them with scoring rubrics. These are handy guides that explain how to weight companies’ merits in various categories as they evaluate one application after the next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more: www.inc.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to Win Any Business Plan Competition, From a 4-Time Winner Alison Alvarez has gotten really good at understanding what judges want. Here are her top tips. Alison Alvarez is a master of the\u00a0business plan\u00a0competition.\u00a0 Her expertise grew out of necessity. When she and her co-founder, Tomer Borenstein, founded BlastPoint in 2016, they knew they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9871,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[31,208,108,561,348,608],"class_list":["post-9869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-business","tag-business-management","tag-business-plan","tag-covid-19","tag-inc","tag-pandemic"],"yoast_head":"\nDazzlepop | How to Win Any Business Plan Competition<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How to Win Any Business Plan Competition Alison Alvarez has gotten really good at understanding what judges want. 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