Riverwood Capital $200,000 competition: Frequently asked questions

Editor’s Note: Sorry about the long delay since our last post but on 3 June 2012 I completely lost feeling in my entire left leg and have not regained it yet. So co-founder boy has been doing it all from carrying my business workload to serving as my personal caretaker and reminding me everyday why he truly is ‘the best co-founder ever’.

At the same time, we have been getting a steady flow of new (and uber awesome) clients and contracts from Chile to Asia and everywhere in between. We would like to thank everyone for your support, generosity, referrals and patience!!!

About 3 weeks ago AndesBeat published a post to officially announce a $200,000 USD Latin America Start-Up Challenge that had just launched by private equity firm, Riverwood Capital (headquartered in Menlo Park, California, USA).

As the only official media partner in Chile at the time of the launch; one of the first media outlets in Latin America to cover the story; and the designated national curator (Chile) for early feedback sessions with Riverwood Capital partners, we started getting a lot of traction out of the gate very quickly (not only from Chile, but also from other countries in Latin America)!

To date, nearly 100 startups (mostly in Chile) have requested to receive AndesBeat support. And many of the start-ups who contacted us, were off the radar so to speak, with no affiliation to incubators/accelerators and this was their first time applying to a start-up competition. As a result, this whole experience was new to them and we ended up getting a bunch of questions and challenges related to both the application process and positioning their specific product or service offering.

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So in this post, we are going to share some of those questions along with a few tips that highlight the common mistakes we have seen in our initial one-on-one consulting sessions and hope that the information will be useful to others applying to the competition.

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