Come to World-Cafe format, passionate with your start-up idea & give a shining pitch!
As part of “Ad Discovery & Creativity Lab” from the Media, Communication and Culture Department of Panteion University, our professor Mrs Betty Tsakarestou designed and ran a workshop based on Speed Dating for start-ups and World Cafe methodology. All “Ad Discoverers” students have the chance to play in rounds 3 roles. Firstly, pitching to one of your peers (from a different team), secondly, asking two questions and giving feedback to the pitching person, and, lastly, playing the role of observer who finally gives feedback to both pitching person and the questioner-feedback person. After the first round was completed, we flipped roles and also moved around changing tables offering the opportunity to all teams to pitch, ask questions, give feedback and observe the different team. Undoubtfully, it was an inspiring mission for all of us participating in and, in turn, it constituted an instructive process on the basis of exploiting fully the dynamics of this experience.
Concerning my overall experience participating in this vivid process of “speed dating”, it strengthened my desire to dive deeper inte the world of entrepreneurship. This demanding methodology is no more than a hub let students sharing similar dreams interact and exchange their ideas. I feel blessed taking part in it, as i played the such a difficult role of pitcher. My 5-member team created a start-up project, namely HeartTalk, during the mentioned above lab. HeartTalk is a community platform-application where people suffering from chronic illnesses can come together, exchange thoughts and feel empathy. The users create a profile account completing the kind of illness, their personal data, photos or anything express themselves. Our platform-application is not based on anonymity, on the contrary, boost patients to speak out about their illness and not be ashamed about that. Any time of day user has the chance to submit his/her thought at a frame with the 2 hundreds character limitation. By using an algorithm based on key words, HeartTalk matches users’ thoughts and motivate them chatting privately. Through the empathy that works, patients know that they are not alone, someone else experience the same condition, as a result they feel better.
The fast-dating pitching process to our peers, including the time limitation, helped us to evolve our project and focus on what matters most. Experiencing with more diferrent peer students, at the very least, gave us a better understanding of what we want and if all of team members are in 100% running this project. By responding to peer’s questions and receiving feedback helped us articulate what the start-up’s vulnerabilities are and deepen our collective understanding of our first idea. While our peer students were exposing their idea in a pitch, we played the responsible role of cather, asking critical questions and giving feedback. The longer we talked with them, the more we connected and we we did our best asking out-of-the-box questions in order for them giving a useful feedback. Lastly, playing the observer role boosted me to improve my follow pitching and, subsequently, i exuded more passion for my idea and tried finding new ways to give catchers a shining pitch.
All in all, coming to World-Cafe format shed light on our project gaps that we could not definitely distinguish ourselves. This vivid experience acted as an accelerator for working more and in further moving ahead with our start-up concept.
