All about STEP PitchFest 2022

Six months of learning sessions, mentor calls, and training. Six months of hard work and effort were put in by the cohort.

The STEP Pitch Fest 2022 held on 19th Feb was the culmination of the six-month journey of the third STEP cohort. During the virtual fest, startups from STEP’s third cohort presented their pitches to an audience that consisted of investors, VCs, angels, women-focused funds, philanthropists, and their fellow cohort members.

Ms Renu Shah, the Founder of STEP started the event by welcoming the guests, followed by a quick introduction to the cohort and the diverse sectors in which they are working. She thanked the panel of mentors for guiding the Startups through these months and then opened the floor for the pitches.

A total of 11 startups participated in the pitchfest: 

NON -PROFITS

• Esther Foundation: The Esther enables ambitious women graduates from tier 2 and tier 3 towns to bridge their job-readiness gap and streamline their job discovery process through leveraging online platforms and digital tools.
• EYAR Production: Uses story arts as a medium to create awareness and educate the community on social issues impacting women and youth. It engages the untrained talent in the community through various physical and digital activities.
• Sowgood Foundation: SowGood has developed curriculum-based Nature-Connect programs to integrate farming and composting with the existing learning method, at the school level, to provide a productive and work-based pedagogical approach to children. By creating a farm-based open classroom, where teachers and children learn together in nature, they aim to create awareness through actions.
• Vartmaan Care: Vartmaan is trying to bring mental health solutions viz. counseling, groups therapy, process group, art therapy, acceptance, and commitment therapy under one umbrella to allow access to the most suitable and preferable interventions for youth and those impacted by covid. These services are free of cost.
• Play & Shine Foundation: Aims to bring access to sports training for children who want to choose a career in sports. It functions at the grassroots level, using sports as a cohesive and flexible tool to foster individual and community development. Currently, they have 300plus volunteers and a presence across 33 cities.

SOCIAL ENTERPRISES

• TechPose: Its initiative Gullak provides financial intrusion through crowdfunding for making self-sustaining communities. They are improving the experience of giving by making it transparent, sustainable, and rewarding.
• Urban Nanny: It offers prescreened, skilled, and certified maternity caregivers, through its website and app for millennial parents to aid the families to find easy, reliable, and cheaper help.
• YCM Solutions: India’s first organization to build life skills for dispute prevention to dispute resolution for youth and people who deal with them. It has been creating a network of youth mediators and conflict managers, youth-run conflict management, and community mediation centers to serve citizens.
• CCTech Health& Env Pvt. Ltd: A tech platform to intelligently understand and influence the behavior of cyclists by using behavioral economics & community engagement. The aim is to get more people to cycle and build and nurture the cycling ecosystem in India by rewarding them to cycle more, saving carbon, staying fit, and connecting cyclists through clubs, shops, events, brands, businesses, CSRs, and smart cities.
• LoopHoop: LoopHoop is a tech-enabled e-commerce platform. They market the handloom and handicraft products produced by rural women and help them earn. They employ urban women who cannot work outside their homes, the flexibility to work from home.
• Dhaatu: It is a waste to wellness brand from Nepal. It aims to reduce landfill pressure by recycling electronic waste into responsible household products. These products are light on the environment, have wellness benefits for the consumer, and preserve the heritage metalcraft of the country.

 Every startup was allowed five minutes to pitch their concept and 10 mins for Q&A and feedback. 

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” Albert Einstein.

A good pitch revolves around the following fields.:

• The Problem
• The SolutionProduct/Service
• Market Size
• Business Model
• Competition
• Competitive Advantage
• Traction & Milestones
• Fundraising Information
• Storytelling

Effective pitches need to strengthen their stories with accurate data to prove the viability of their concept. 

The panellists tried to test the founders on the clarity of their vision and confidence in their plan and gave their valuable insights and suggestions to improve their ventures.

The speaker Mr Abhi Yadav, Entrepreneur with successful exits talked about how to weave impact into pitches.” Your hyper-focus on the problem is going to attract investors. The investors should be able to trust you and your conviction in the project.”

The event ended with EY India business consulting partner, Paresh Vaish sharing insights from his life and his 30 year-long experience in this industry. His advice to entrepreneurs of nonprofits was to think of a capital-light plan, attempt to self-fund the organization and try the idea in a small microcosm to learn its effectiveness before scaling up.

There is a saying that, “ Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.”  We at STEP believe that every cohort member would resonate that they came out stronger at the end of the 6-month journey with STEP. 

With this, the third cohort of STEP (Shakti-The Empathy Project) has now graduated. 

We wish them the best in their future endeavours.

“An end is only a beginning in disguise.” 

A new set of startups will begin their 6-month journey with us in the coming months. If you are a womanpreneur trying to solve a social problem and create an impact in society, we invite you to be a part of STEP’s incubation program or nudge the ones you know to apply: https://shaktipreneurs.org