AUSTIN, TEXAS — Sarah Roche rushed from the front of the room to the back corner to consult with her group. Her team was up in the next round of the “Entrepreneurial Eight” – the final round of the Student Startup Madness competition at South by Southwest.

While most teams were huddled together in seemingly intense conversations, Roche was bobbing up and down, laughing and joking with her teammates.

Roche, a master’s student in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and co-founder of PlatypusTV, flew from Syracuse to present her team’s startup business, PlatypusTV, to a panel of distinguished entrepreneurs.

“It’s very intimidating to stand in front of that many people and defend your business,” Roche said.

College students from across the country prepared to pitch their startups at SXSW in Austin, Texas, Monday evening as part of a competition that provides college students with the opportunity to pitch their digital media startups.

The stakes: a $5,000 credit that can go toward the Google Cloud platform to improve the startup’s infrastructure.

Student Startup Madness was created with the goal of pulling out all the great innovation and entrepreneurship happening on college campuses across the country, said Sean Branagan, the director of Newhouse’s Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship and creator of Student Startup Madness.

The competition requires students to take the stage and pitch their ideas for four minutes and then endure seven minutes of follow up questions from the panel of judges.

Last year, Michigan State’s TempoRun — an app designed to sort and play music according to a user’s running tempo — won the competition.

Bernie Eisbrenner, a junior environmental economics major at Michigan State, delivered the first pitch for a startup called Carbon Cash. It’s an app designed for college students to track and record their energy consumption that also rewards them with points they can redeem at local and national retailers.

Brian Cohen, chairman of the New York Angels and the first investor in Pinterest, fired the first question.

“What if they don’t have a monitoring system?” he asked to challenge the application’s function.

Chase Gaewski | Managing Editor

Bernie Eisbrenner, an environmental economics major from Michigan State University, addresses the judge’s key concerns during the question and answer portion of the their presentation.

In a heated session of question and answer, Cohen, followed by the other judges, bombarded the team with a series of questions focused on the business’s most fundamental concepts.

One by one teams took the stage, defending their projects against the scrutiny of the experienced professionals. As soon as the first half of competitors finished, the room became a nervous buzz of, as Sean Branagan described it, “Holy s**t.”

Melinda Emerson, president of Quintessence Multimedia, and Sandy Khaund, senior director of emerging technologies of Turner Broadcasting, joined Cohen on the panel.

Branagan said the student startups were judged on four key criteria: strength of concept, strength of team, the size of the market and traction.

“If you think about it, [the judges] are placing bets,” Branagan said.

It was a high stakes, high risk and high reward kind of investment.

As soon as the break ended, the students and spectators returned to their seats and a Seton Hall University student dressed in blue jeans and a black T-shirt with “Notefu.ly” stripped across his chest in white text took the stage.

Emerson introduced Taseen Peterson, a senior business major, while Roche remained on deck, waiting for her turn to pitch.

Smoothly, Peterson pitched the premise of his startup: an app that allows its users to share short pieces of information across all digital devices through virtual sticky notes. Notefu.ly recently celebrated 4 million downloaders, he said. He also mentioned that the app has received as many as 2,000 new downloads per day, generating more than $430,000 in ad sales, and has ranked in the top 3 overall applications in the IOS app store.

As a three-man team, Peterson said they have accomplished so much without any outside funding, “simply by putting out a good product.”

“Not only are we taking note-taking to a new level, but we are taking bootstrapping to a new level as well,” he joked.

Following Peterson, Roche, the SU student, walked to the microphone with a grin.

PlatypusTV is a social platform that allows its users to timestamp and comment on television shows, chaptering and sharing their experience with other users, Roche explained in her pitch. The platform aims to create a user base of fan communities.

Her pitch, however, did not get the same approval as Peterson’s, which earned him a “bravo” from Cohen. Some of the judges wrestled with how the product would interact with or modify the shows—an area that, Roche said, appears to be a constant stumbling block.

“It’s very hard for people, especially that are in traditional media, to understand that you can do different things without touching the actual content,” she said.

With no further questions, Roche raised an eyebrow, smiled, then made for the corner of the room, where her teammates high-fived her.

In the end, it was Peterson’s Notefu.ly that took the prize. StylePuzzle, a mobile app that recommends personalized outfit combinations to its users, won first runner up, and Find My Song, an online networking service for music makers, came in second.

Peterson said the next step for Notefu.ly will be launching its Cloud service as well as the IOS 7 update within the next week or so.

Like Peterson, PlatypusTV will be busy as it heads back to Syracuse. The startup team will be working out a few technical issues, said Nomi Foster, the CEO and co-founder of PlatypusTV. The startup will then head into an accelerator, based in Syracuse, to help further the creation of PlatypusTV. The team will eventually focus on adding more developers.

“That’s the thing about startups,” Roche said. “You always have 30 things to work on.”

Published on March 12, 2014 at 6:36 pm