Eat Your Rejections, Gulliver
From A Founder To All Her Supporters & Customers — The Backstory of Her Travel Startup
Actually — it has been more than two years since this idea was conceptualized in my head. I got rejected from Techstar’s Accelerator Program in Boston today, and felt it would be a good time to document and share this journey as well as what to expect from us with everyone — customers, friends, family and strangers included.
At this point, I have revised my deck over 50 times, applied, interviewed, and pitched at over 20 accelerators/grants/competitions. While I am grateful to say we managed to snag a couple of awards and prizes, $60k in equity-free grants, free incubation at a co-working space in school, $5000 AWS credits, and more, we have also faced many, many more rejections, and are still far off from where we hope to be.
Backstory
It started off as PINT, aka. a ‘Tinder for Travel’ back in 2018 when I was still in New York City, where I pitched it during one of my entrepreneurship modules I was taking back in college. At that time, it was a nascent idea which I had developed for another course and gotten brutally shot down.
