This post is regarding our experience with TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual tech event organised by the media outlet TechCrunch, which takes place in various parts of the world (SF, NY, Berlin, etc.), the most notable one being SF.
So we spent 2 days of our development time to submit this application and were very hopeful of being selected (Isn’t that how every startup thinks?). Usually, they respond within a month from the time of submitting the application. The application consisted of possibly every question regarding our startup, from customer segments, to pricing, to expected launch date, yadayadayada.
Worth mentioning, we spent a lot of time creating our product video for the application, which was ‘Mandatory.’ They wanted us to show something that worked, not a high quality production video. This video could also be at a max length of 2 minutes and they preferred that we upload it on YouTube.
Once done, we submitted the application and all we had to do was wait.
2 weeks pass by, and we could see that our video had got over 20 view. I have to admit, it felt reassuring that we could pull this off. Add in another week and now we were sitting at over 40 views. All of a sudden, we get this auto generated mail from TechCrunch, saying we haven’t been selected and there is no way we should co-related this rejection to the validity of our Startup idea. The news was painful, there is no doubt about that, but were we missing something? Had they really analysed our application properly? What were their thoughts?
Just out of suspicion, we got into our analytics dashboard on YouTube to see some stats related to our product video. Aha, there it was! They did not even see the video!!! On the analytics dashboard, we can see the countries from where people have viewed our video. In our case, there were only 2 countries mentioned, India (that’s where we are based) and Italy (Totally unexpected)
This just makes me wonder, how on earth could TC reject our application even without seeing what we do?
It is highly unlikely that they would’ve rejected the application by READING the contents within the application! Why would you spend 15 minutes reading when you could just see a 2 min video and get the product concept? If you reject based on the product video, then contents really wouldn’t matter as you would’ve made your decision! But what if you hadn’t even seen the video? How could you reach to some conclusion?
Well, maybe that’s just how it works in the media industry, you’re a nobody if you don’t have influence, where it’s okay to give people false hopes and deceive them for Ad $s.
Overall, this is clearly something you do not expect from a Tech news giant like TC but hey, ‘who’s looking?’
