AJ Agrawal of @Alumnify: The Progress We made & The Lessons Learned

“By the time I delivered my pitch, I was ready for anything the judges could throw at me.” – AJ Agrawal

Since our last appearance on Billion Success we’ve seen some amazing progress. First off we’ve been able to add 8 University clients, raised over $100,000 in funding and continued to refine our value proposition. Additionally, we’ve really been able to grow our team, bringing development completely in house and filling in team members to help solve our weaknesses. By expanding our team and being able to focus on all of our strengths, we’ve learned how important it is to get the right people on the right seats.

Our mobile application is currently being reviewed for the Apple Store and we plan to launch our first marketing campaign with our first University client in the next month. We’ve discovered that the key to really making a company successful is putting your individual team members in a position where they can show off what they’re good at and pass off the things they struggle with to another team member.

Winning

In addition, we are coming off a huge success winning the V2 Pitch competition. The V2 competition is a pitch contest held every year by the University of San Diego. Over time, it has developed into one of the largest events on campus and a huge proving ground for startup ideas. Previous winners have seen amazing progress after winning the V2 competition. For example, last years winner went on to raise over $800,000 of funding after claiming first place. This year was the hardest year to win yet. Over 60 teams applied and the amount of funding doubled in the contest.

After competing in the final four in early April we won the grand prize and walked away with $40,000 out of a total of $50,0000 that was invested. It was a huge win for us and very shocking. No team has won by that margin before, so as you can imagine we were stunned and excited at the same time. Because our company started at USD, it means a lot for us to say that we are backed by my own alma mater.

The funding will be used to help gain more clients, continue to develop our product, and ensure that we are creating the best experience possible for our University clients.We were also introduced to a lot of angel investors and venture capitalists afterwards, so we know how much winning the V2 competition will help us down the road besides the funding.

Lessons Learned

The greatest takeaway we learned from winning the competition was the importance of practice. I practiced my pitch over 300 times for the contest, and wrote down over 150 questions investors would ask on notecards. By the time I delivered my pitch, I was ready for anything the judges could throw at me. I believe this work ethic and focus comes from my experience running cross country in college. No one ever sees the amount of miles and hours you put in to practice, they only see your race. The same can be said about pitching your business. It is an art, and the best way to perfect your art is to constantly refine your skills.