Pilot 1 — LIFT Incubator Demo Day
No time to plan. No time to panic. Just launch.
This month has been exciting — and honestly, a little bit of a nail-biter. A lot happened fast.
So first, let me just say: I’m not heavy into social media. I don’t post every day (though I’m working on it), but I am always there — observing, watching, listening. I love seeing what people are talking about, what’s happening in culture, in tech, in the news. That’s how I stay tapped in.
One day I was scrolling LinkedIn and saw a post about a new WhatsApp group forming for Atlanta founders. And through that, I found a post about the LIFT Incubator Demo Day — an event happening at the AUC, right here in Atlanta, with real founders pitching live.
At this point, the iOS version of the app was already done and approved. I hadn’t even submitted for Google Play yet because, honestly, I didn’t have any concrete plans for after the app was built. But when I saw that demo day post, I thought — what if we could pilot the app there?
I reached out to someone involved — Khadijah Robinson, Executive Director of the Center for Black Entrepreneurship (CBE) — and showed her a quick demo video. The CBE is a collaboration between Spelman College, Morehouse College, and the Black Economic Alliance Foundation, and this particular event — the LIFT Incubator Demo Day — was held on January 30 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM at the Bank of America Auditorium at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Khadijah replied and said, “This looks great, let’s do it.”
I could not believe it. The app had barely been live for a month, and we already had our first official pilot.
Last-Minute Pivots & Paper Backups
There was just one problem — Khadijah didn’t have an iPhone. So now I’m scrambling. I rush to get the Android version submitted, only to find out Google Play had changed some of their policies since I last submitted an app. Everything was taking longer.
I ended up going to Office Depot and printing out paper forms based on the app’s interface. If attendees didn’t have iPhones, they could still rate the startups using those printouts. It wasn’t ideal, but we were going to make it work.
Here’s How the App Works
It’s simple and fast.
Log in with Google or Apple.
Tap into the event.
See a live leaderboard of the participating startups.
Tap into a startup and give your ratings:
- Problem: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Solution: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Presentation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Would you support this startup? (Yes/No) → If yes, how?
- Would you hypothetically invest? (Yes/No) → If yes, how much?
- Do you think it’s a unicorn? (Optional)
- Want to leave feedback? → Open field.
Once someone submits their rating, it gets added to a public feed — unless they choose to post anonymously (which still shares the info with the startup privately). That feature was important to me, and I was glad I built it, because Khadijah specifically asked if the feedback could be anonymous. I was able to say, “Yes — already done.”
And the best part? The leaderboard updates in real time, so you can actually see which startups are gaining momentum.
What’s Next
The event was a huge success. I’m still tallying up some of the data and organizing results, so I’ll be back in February with a full breakdown of how it went — what we learned, what worked, and what’s next.
But I’ll say this:
The app was real.
The pilot was real.
And the momentum is very real.
Stay tuned.