Bell joined Temple’s business incubator, and won $500 in a pitch competition. With her student discount, it was enough to get a Mac, but not much else. So when she found a $1 million team pitch competition, she knew she had to apply. Bell asked fellow alum Johnny Velazquez and two close friends to join her on stage in Boston. They made it to the semifinals, but didn’t win. After a few more competitions, Bell noticed a pattern:
Apply and get accepted.
Appear in the competition’s promotional material.
Advance to the final round.
And then… nothing.
“I’m being told, ‘Oh, you have a good idea, but you don’t have a product.’ ‘Yes, we saw you got a prototype, but [the winner’s] actually on the market,’” she says now. “The goalposts kept moving.”
By 2017, Velazquez had gone from being Bell’s pitch deck designer to Pound Cake’s co-founder. But after a solid year of losing pitch competitions, they were ready to quit. Advisors from Temple’s incubator advised them to do market research first. After speaking to 300 people, Bell knew two things: They shouldn’t quit and it was time for crowdfunding.
Let’s go to our own community who will get it, she thought.
Some tricks and an unexpected treat
Get it they did: By Halloween 2017, the last day of Pound Cake’s Indiegogo campaign, 167 backers had helped the duo reach a little over half of their $20,000 goal.
“We’re just talking each other up, like, ‘It’s still a success. We can still take this money,’” Bell remembers. “And all of a sudden, I refresh the campaign and it says we surpassed our goal.”
After Velazquez got Bell to explain what she was “Oh my god”-ing about, an email from someone at a major tech company explained the sudden $10k’s provenance.