The acceptance into Georgetown SLP
It was fast.
On May 8, we submitted the application for the Georgetown Summer Launch Program (SLP), a short form with fewer than ten questions. I think the process took me less than two hours from start to finish. Being a Hoya, I was 99% confident that we would be able to get accepted.
On May 13, we sent in an executive summary so as to complete the application process. As in version 1.0, I think the one-pager quite clearly demonstrated the problem we tried to solve, but the solution and business model sections could have been better articulated.
On May 14, Alyssa Lovegrove, the Associate Director of the program, reached out to schedule a meeting with us to better understand our idea and to “make sure our program is the best fit for what you want to achieve.” I was hesitant to respond right away; we had been anxiously waiting for MassChallenge Round 2′s results. At the time, the way we thought SLP was described was such that it was geared towards the startups who wanted to gain customer traction and get ready to attract investors. We had not been that far along yet.
On May 18, during my time-off in Las Vegas, Drew wrote me that our priorities should be 1. finding a developer, and 2. iterating design; and that SLP would not be necessarily a good fit for us. We agreed to still meet Alyssa so as to explore alternative opportunities. Drew drafted an open-ended response and I sent Alyssa an email the next day upon my return to DC. We learnt later that week that we were not selected to advance further with MassChallenge. The result was not unexpected, but we had been hopeful. The presentation Drew gave in this Round 2 had been, by far, the best one of Wanderus.
On May 22, three days later, Alyssa wrote back at 1:47 PM and suggested a conference call on the same day (Friday! TGIF!), or an in-person meeting on campus the following Monday, which happened to be a holiday, the Memorial Day. In her email, she gave us a heads-up of the time commitment required for SLP. We would be first participating in a two-day bootcamp in the last week of May, followed by six to seven three-hour weekly sessions on campus with assigned mentors and two startup expos, one on Georgetown campus in mid-June and the other in 1776 in late July when the program concluded.
On May 25, Drew and I went to meet Alyssa Lovegrove at her gorgeous townhouse, which is only a few footsteps away from the ever popular Georgetown Cupcakes store. Our chat lasted almost an hour and a half, but it did not feel long. Alyssa herself was a seasoned-entrepreneur-turned-VC-turned-professor-turned-startup-advisor, and was very generous with her advice for our budding idea. One of the key questions she probed us was whether we truly, deeply, thoroughly understood the customer pain, aka “the problem.” She suggested we contemplate about the B2B approach, which Drew commented later on that she had meant B2B2C instead. We walked out of her house, feeling inspired and thought provoked. We were unofficially “in.” Making a quick stop by El Centro nearby to enjoy an early celebratory meal, Drew and I went back to our “workshop” to get ready for the SLP program which commenced only two days later. We knew we had to deliver a three-minute pitch by the end of the bootcamp, and, learning from MassChallenge, we would need a solid pitch script. Practice, practice, practice.
- Anh