The first time strangers said yes

Last November, during San Antonio Startup Week, Ben and I pitched Lumora Sleep at Pitch It To Win It, a competition hosted by Geekdom. It was our first real public pitch. We'd only ever pitched it to friends before, and friends are a useless test audience because they like you. They nod at the weak parts. A room of strangers doesn't owe you a nod.

Pitching with a partner sounds easier than going up alone. It's not. You have to agree on what the company actually is, sentence by sentence, and you find out fast that the two of you have been carrying slightly different companies around in your heads. Getting Ben's version and mine to match was most of the prep.

The format was a mix of public engagement and a judging panel, which means two audiences at once. Judges will sit through your whole pitch out of professional courtesy. The public gives you a couple of seconds before scrolling on. You can rehearse for the judges. There's no rehearsing for the internet.

SA Startup posted the pitch video on Instagram and it passed 40,000 views. When I watch it back I mostly see things I'd fix. But that number does something to your head. Everyone who had ever told me Lumora was a good idea had some reason to be nice to me. Those 40,000 people didn't. Each of them could have kept scrolling, and they didn't.

We won first place and $1,000. Two verdicts at once, really: the panel liked it and the engagement backed it up. The money went straight into product development. A thousand dollars in product development goes fast, and I think that's the correct use of it. Prize money that sits untouched in an account is just a trophy with worse aesthetics.

I'd braced for the pitch itself to be the hard part. It wasn't. The hard part was the waiting. A room of strangers has no polite version of no, and in November they told us yes. We're back to building now, and the next time we pitch Lumora, it won't be our first.