How to Win Any Business Plan Competition, From a 4-Time Winner

Alison Alvarez has gotten really good at understanding what judges want. Here are her top tips.

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: Leverage artificial intelligence to help public utilities, banks, and automotive companies analyze their massive customer lists. In their estimation, most data tools weren’t built for salespeople or others who might really benefit from them. Plus, 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. “Often you hear about the ‘friends and family round,'” comments Alvarez, referring to founders bootstrapping their companies by way of benevolent relatives. She wondered, “If you don’t have those, what do you do?” 

Alvarez and Borenstein decided to bootstrap the Pittsburgh-based BlastPoint through competitions and grants. Alvarez viewed it as something akin to scholarship applications, which she had grown expert at as a student. She funded both her undergraduate and graduate educations with scholarships. 

The strategy worked. In the past four years, the company has won four such competitions, ranging in size from 2017’s UpPrize, which came with a $160,000 reward, all the way to a small $2,000 payoff in the GVS Labs AI Pitch competition in 2020. 

“We got really good at that as a way to get capital for basic things,” says Alvarez. “Like, we need a printer, let’s go to a quick pitch competition,” referencing how she entered and won TiE Pittsburgh. She notes an additional benefit of her business-competition funding strategy: “Investors show up.” At that point, she says, “it becomes less about the money, more about expanding our network,” which is key, especially when Covid-19 has made socializing normally so hard. 

Here, Alvarez shares a few the tricks she uses to prevail. 

Ask to see the judging guidelines.

Competitions often try to make life easy for their judges, who tend to be high profile, busy, and donating their time, by providing them with scoring rubrics. These are handy guides that explain how to weight companies’ merits in various categories as they evaluate one application after the next.

Read more: www.inc.com