Good morning,
Alison Alvarez is a master of the business plan competition.
Her expertise grew out of necessity. When she and her co-founder, Tomer Borenstein, founded BlastPoint in 2016, they knew they had a winning business idea: Most data tools aren't built for salespeople or others who might really benefit from them. The pair of computer scientists knew their stuff--both had graduate degrees from Carnegie Mellon; Alvarez had also earned her MBA at the University's Tepper School of Business.
But neither had financial resources, And when founders talk about "bootstrapping" at such an early stage, they can occasionally gloss over just how nice those boots can be. "Often, you hear about the friends-and-family round--can you get your rich uncle to write you a check?" Alvarez tells Inc. "But if you don't have those, what do you do?" Her answer: competitions and grants. In the past four years, BlastPoint has won four separate business plan competitions, ranging in payoffs from $2,000 to $160,000.
Sometimes, they needed the money for basic necessities, like buying a new printer. Other times, they’ve leveraged the opportunities to meet investors and expand their networks--especially during the past year, when Covid-19 has made socializing normally so hard.
Read our story to learn Alavarez’s top four tricks for winning startup competitions--and why they work. |
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