A while ago, I came across an entrepreneurship competition for idea-stage and early-stage entrepreneurs from all over Africa that was being organized by a large multi-national company. I was pretty excited about it and even went ahead to create an account to send in an application. As someone who has been in this space for a while both as project manager for a youth entrepreneurship project and an entrepreneur myself, the first information I was interested in was the selection criteria. Oh yes, that was very important to me. 

A lot of entrepreneurs are quick to turn in applications without taking the time to study and understand the evaluation criteria. As business people, our time is a scarce resource that we simply do not have. Moreso, if you are a career woman with a family and an early-stage business you commit yourself to, on a part-time basis. This is the reality of several African women by the way. Therefore, it is pertinent that we prioritize the activities we pay attention to but I digress.

So back to this pitch competition. I look at the prize section I see coaching, I see financial reward and I see media visibility. This was a perfect mix of rewards for me. I scroll down to the bottom of the page and I see feasibility, sustainability and novelty of the idea as the key areas they would be focusing on while selecting the potential winner. As an advocate of innovation myself, I think, fair enough. I keep going through the page and then I see that participants would have to leverage social media to promote their startups in exchange for “likes” to get to the next round and I instantly lose interest. 

Having led an entrepreneurship program myself, I understand that introducing a social media component into the program is crucial to giving the program the maximum amount of press. I get that. As a matter of fact, the International Labour Organization in a manual they put together for business plan competitions, state that the media is critical for boosting the event’s reach and bringing visibility to the winners. Social media used the wrong way can be quite detrimental to the success of pitch competitions. 

Kindly permit me to paint two scenarios. If a startup had no sound business model, no sizeable addressable market but had 20 million followers on their social media platforms because they paid a celebrity to endorse them, would you want to invest your money in such a business? A startup has access to the best videographer, and digital marketer money can buy, seeing as human beings can be quite visual, does this not already pose an unfair advantage for other contestants who may have little resources for promotion but are solving a genuine need? It certainly takes away from the effectiveness of the solution which should be at the forefront of the selection criteria. Do you see where I am going with this?

An article I came across simply describes competitions that rely on social media voting as a “cheat magnet” and I totally agree. Eli Velasquez, Director of Venture Development at VentureWell, opines that this approach to pitch competitions puts the organizers more in the spotlight as opposed to the founders. Once again, I am also in agreement. 

Kudos to the organizers, incubators and accelerators that do it right because, in this era of glitz and glam, it becomes easy to lose the real gem in the middle of the crowd.