My experience with startup competitions
To preface this, I am an indie hacker. I am a bootstrapper. I have never had a VC funded startup and I don’t really plan to create one in the future. Might happen, probably not though. So my experience with startup competitions comes from a place of “exposing” myself and my idea to a panel of industry experts, getting feedback, getting connections and maybe somebody wants to give me money someday. But that’s not really the point for me.
When creating my story drafting software “Draftical” from 2019 - 2022 I took part in two competitions. First was Kreativsonar 2021 and the second one was Saarland-Accelerator. Unfortunately for my english readers, you might have to google-translate those sites, they are german competitions.
For Kreativsonar, you were able to sign up when your product had anything to do with the creative working industry, i.e. say journalists, authors, writers, bloggers, artists and their surrounding bubble. You could win a guerilla marketing workshop weekend and were introduced to potential accelerator programs, funding opportunities and business partners. A great deal, as you only had to show up once and had to talk about your idea with three different panels of industry experts, VC people, business leaders etc.
For Saarland Accelerator (funded by government, explicitly for our german state), getting accepted would have meant that my startup would go through a round of mentoring, workshops, preparation meetings to then in the end go in front of a large audience and present the idea to potential investors and partners. To sign up, you had to present to - it was 2021 mind you - an online audience of just those people and more experts, marketing people, leaders and so forth.
