Highlights of Greenhouse Lab Bootcamp for Top 10 Finalists of the NES25 Startup Pitch Competition
Lagos, Nigeria, October 18, 2019
GreenHouse Capital and Venture Garden Group, in partnership with Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) sub-committee and Sterling Bank sponsored the 25th Nigerian Economic Summit (NES25) startup pitch competition on October 6th.
In the lead up to the event, GreenHouse Capital hosted the 10 pitch competition finalists at their Vibranium Valley tech hub for an intensive, week-long bootcamp aimed at helping them improve their business models as well as prepare their pitches for the grand finale. The bootcamp was run alongside GreenHouse Capital’s tech accelerator program, GreenHouse Lab, which provides promising and emerging startups with valuable resources such as advisory, mentorship, hands-on training and technical assistance, which then propels them towards investor readiness.
The hands-on bootcamp began with a pitch presentation session that enabled GreenHouse Capital to holistically assess each entrepreneur and set a baseline for improvement. Finalists were then immersed into select GreenHouse Lab sessions tailored to critical areas that were valuable to the finalists. This also gave them the opportunity to engage with the wider cohort of entrepreneurs within the Lab with whom they could partner and learn from.
Key sessions addressed building a strong start-up startegy; the use of data in facilitating decision making ; developing a value proposition; and using key financial metrics such as customer acquisition cost & customer life-time value to inform the profitability of a business.
The select sessions enabled each entrepreneur assess the understanding of their business, their customer/market and the market-size and more importantly, the sessions ensured that they built solutions which addressed the problems unique to their customers. Each entrepreneur was able to harness data in creating roadmaps and business projections.
Five mentors, with diverse subject matter expertise, were assigned to the finalists to work with them throughout the week. The Mentors ensured that the lessons learned in the sessions where adapted to and applied to their specific businesses. The mentors worked directly with their assigned companies to improve the flow and quality of their pitches and presentation slides. Additionally, during the pitch competition, the mentors doubled as champions for their partner startups! The finalists found the one-on-one sessions with their mentors to be the highlight of the bootcamp. By the end of the week, the finalists had better understanding of their businesses, the market they played in and the way their innovative solutions solved unique problems. This realignment to the core objective of their businesses and critical mindset shift was applied to their decks and it greatly improved their pitch.
The Bootcamp ended with a series of iterative pitching sessions by each entrepreneur to perfect the tone, flow, quality and confidence conveyed in the presentation. The mentors assigned to each start-up was present to provided immediate feedback and highlight critical areas for further improvement. By final pitch, by each entrepreneur exuded more confidence and was able to articulate their business in a concise manner, assimilating all the lesson-learned.
The Bootcamp culminated with the Pitch Competition during the closing plenary of the 25th Nigerian Economic Summit meeting in Abuja. The finalists had the opportunity to present their startup to a curated audience of distinguished members of Nigeria’s private sector, including investors, accelerators/incubators, entrepreneurs, development agencies, government agencies, and corporate leaders. The top three startups got ₦5 million, ₦3 million and ₦2 million in grants, respectively and a ₦1 million audience choice prize was awarded to one of the finalists.
About the NESG Startup Pitch Competition
The Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) introduced a Startup Pitch Competition in 2017, as part of the Annual Nigerian Economic Summit. The pitch competition creates an avenue through which, young, innovative Nigerian startups can engage with the wide array of stakeholders drawn to annual Summit Additionally, startups participating in the competition are given the opportunity to win catalytic funding to help them scale their businesses.
Originally published at https://medium.com on November 8, 2019.
