We were selected to fight it out at the Techcrunch Battlefield, something we can be very proud of achieving. Competition was fierce, there were more than 400 applicants and the final 17 were a high quality group.

High Quality Competition

Mean average funding amongst the finalists was just over $1.25M USD , the Median was $450,000 USD demonstrating the social proof that many of our fellow finalists had already created before reaching this stage.

Experienced entrepreneurs were also in the mix, with some of the startups having executive experience from companies such as Tudou and E*Trade. Another 2 of the startups were from the chinaccelerator incubation programme in Dalian.

Average company size was 15 employees, with a median of 10 of those that reported their employee numbers on Crunchbase or counted from Linkedin. Of the 6 companies who I couldn't find employee numbers, they had an average of over $1M USD in rasied capital, median of $830,000 USD.

The Preparations

It's a very well organised competition. Every finalist signs an NDA, so we were not allowed to let anyone know that we would be in the final, this meant telling many people that we were going just for the conference. We arrived a couple of days before the battle. A quick rehearsal was completed during the hackathon where the techcrunch team + advisors, gave some quick tips about the presentation.

After revising our notes, the day before was used for the tech rehearsal. This was where we glimpsed the other finalists. The role of this rehearsal was to make sure our technical requirements were met, e.g. audio, laptop connections, close-up camera incase you were demo-ing on a live handset. 

The demo itself is expected to be live, and video should only be used as a backup.

The Competition

We went backstage about 45 minutes before we were supposed to present. Lot's of people rushing around behind the scenes. The presenters introduced themselves and we did last minute preparations to get ready. Then we went up on stage and presented -