National Micro Enterprise Pitching Bootcamp 2023 Episode 2: Did the Lightbulb Get Dimmer?

Good Morning everybody! It is me, Hanissa (@cowboybackwards) again and today we are starting our second day of the Micro Enterprise Pitching Competition Bootcamp 2022.

Today we are starting the day at 8 am (but for me I started my day at 6:30 just to avoid jam! Bukit Jalil jam goes crazy). It’s going to be a long, tiring (I had four hours of sleep (dedication bruh)), but fun day today. We have 5 different speakers planned and a bunch of mini breaks (which is good for me whew).

Everyone had to meet at MRANTI, Bukit Jalil at around 8 am for breakfast before we started our first session at 9. We had breakfast and it was so delicious. It really fuelled us for the day ahead.

Beginning at 9 am, we had a practice round with a few different groups to see how much they have added and learned from yesterday. My friend Ainul from yesterday started talking about nikah early in the morning, it was so funny. I interviewed them to ask about how it’s going so far!

After the practice round, we had five speakers today: Jason Low, the founder of Virtual Tech Frontier, Badzlan Bakar from Saladin Ventures, Afiq from Tracker Hero, Stanley Chong from Ingenious Group, and Rajifah from Data8.

From yesterday, we've learned that the "why" of the product is the most important part of selling. Rajifa from Data8 created an app for hospitals nationwide. It's used for emergencies where the doctors can update each other about upcoming patients. The why here is to shorten waiting time for patients and for doctors, it will be easy for them to figure out what to prepare right before the patient comes in. This is an important note for the participants to remember; yes you have the product, but why? what is the purpose of it?

Jason Low, the founder of Virtualtech Frontier heavily works with virtual reality. He advises finding "an opportunity" when it comes to creating an idea; to find what is lacking. During covid, it was hard to make public events, so Jason comes up with virtual events for the public to attend. I guess it's similar to the Lil Nas X Roblox concert 2 years ago. Maybe Jason can host a BTS concert on Roblox next... or on his more advance... technology.

Badzlan Bakar came in and shared with us about brand values and how to build a startup in a strategic way..or in 18 months... because of the business cycle. He's very prolific. Looking at his journey, from an Air Steward to a hotel owner, I think he just loves hospitality.

This guy is Afiq, quite an interesting guy. He told us that he had to fill in for his brother and his brother is an alumnus of UTeM. They actually manage to make money with his brother's FYP, doing tracking of some sort. Their journey is not without pain but I've heard that they are now global and moving to a bigger office in Cyberjaya!

Stanley came in a bit later to share his experience with pitching to investors. I've heard that he helped entrepreneurs raise tons of Ringgit...like triple-digit millions... He told the students to know what to ask, know when to ask, and know how to ask for money.

When the students were doing their work, obviously I had to intervene to ask about how their pitch was going (and because I wanted to meet as many friends as possible).

I interviewed David and his friends, and one of our other mentors, Haziq, was there too!  So far, they got it under control and by the looks of it, they seemed pretty confident.

Also! We got updates from the mustache man and his gang. They were quite upbeat at noon and they learned something new! They learned about business model canvas and they are definitely adding that into their pitch. Zarif (far right), was only excited about the food... do they just come here for the food? Aiyoyo... we'll see how they'll do tomorrow on their final pitch. Good luck UiTM Sha Aley!

After the lunch break, we continued our talking sessions with the rest of the speakers. Before they head out, they got to see the Makerspace! It is where students can 3D print their prototypes and Mr Ramesh had a lot of examples to show all the students.

Here are other friends (victims... since I kept on bothering them) that I made today. Their idea is about improving learning methods from games. They plan to change the style of learning to get students to be interested in STEM again. I used to be a STEM student, but here I am writing articles (which I hope you olz enjoy)... maybe I just needed their product to help me learn chemistry LMAO.

THAT WAS NOT THE END OF THE DAY! At 8 pm, the students had an online mentoring session with Ellynita. She’s a pretty cool kakak from Denmark who works with the LEGO Group. Isn’t that crazy?! …Do yall think she gets a discount when she buys legos? Anyways,  Someone from the LEGO Group was talking to us! The students got to ask Ellynita about her opinion on their personal projects and she gave such helpful feedback.

Here is her Linkedin profile if you guys want to check her out:

That concludes our second day at Micro Enterprise Pitching Competition Bootcamp 2022… for the participants. But for the rest of the crew, we stayed quite late to wrap all their gifts for tomorrow! I hope they’ll appreciate our dedicated hard work in wrapping all the gifts (it took us quite a while hahaha).

I am so excited for tomorrow to see what everyone has in their final product. I heard that there will be a lot of judges tomorrow... a lot of expertise.... a lot of big people coming... that's a lot of pressure for all the participants. I have big hopes for everybody and I'm pretty sure they all got everything covered.

Goodnight everyone! Catch you guys tomorrow!