Founders must articulate their value proposition, get early product traction, discover product market fit, etc. These skills often need to be improved in most startup teams.

That's why Mario and Christian (both founders and PBA Alumni) introduced PolkaBiz, a program approved by the community under Referendum 657. This MVP program, running from April to August 2024, aims to prepare founders to present their fine-tuned ideas to investors. The program's climax was a matchmaking event between founders and investors on July 11th, serving as a side event to Decoded.

Although we need to make a few minor adjustments here and there, we are extremely satisfied with the results achieved so far.

• We collaborated strongly with the PBA. At the time of the first proposal, there was no plan to start a side project for technical founders, nor did we anticipate flying to Singapore.
• We conducted an Elevator Pitch 101 session with Parity at Decoded and organized a pitching session with PBA and Brinc. Our logo was visible during the keynote session in Brussels, and we were regularly mentioned positively on Twitter. In short, over the past 5 months, PolkaBiz has made a difference...

This new proposal aims to build on our program's success and request funding for the next 4 months (September-December 2024). From the first proposal, we learned what works well (such as the collaboration with the PBA or the founder-investor matchmaking event), but we aim to keep evolving. Therefore, we have added 3 new initiatives we want to try out in addition to what was already a success in our first edition.

• We will add business-related video content to our website, freely accessible to everyone.
• We will expand the Pitch & Mentor program beyond onsite applications and offer it online for the first time.
• We will explore the impact of events in this new proposal. The goal is to generate more exposure for startups/teams building on Polkadot and attract new investors and founders into the ecosystem. Firstly, this means collecting data through a portal from companies building on Polkadot - we will call this our founders-community. Secondly, we want to attract new investors at these events, primarily for our PolkaBiz matchmaking events. This way, investors can get acquainted with the new initiatives within Polkadot.

We encourage everyone to read our comprehensive 19-page proposal. Please use the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rgjvppqx4u39hvDYeKhhKGzoY6JT55MrtiIoFOJ69ro/edit?usp=sharing

The amount we ask for is $94,800 USDT.