A founder with a physical product can spend a year looking for the right room. M-Spire is MAGNET's annual pitch competition for those founders, and this video explains it in about three minutes. The speakers say MAGNET works with people who have something they will one day manufacture. They say the room can include a panel of judges, and that the point is not only a prize. It is a connection to people: strategic guidance through the iterator program, engineering help, and experts such as intellectual-property lawyers and marketers.
The video lets one company say what that room did for them. A founder of a welding system talks about a shortage of welders and a robot that is supposed to see the job and start. He says the competition was where they sharpened the pitch, and where they met a person who came on as an advisor and later joined as a co-founder. The close is the reason MAGNET runs it: new products, and a regional economy that has something new to make. Those outcomes are what the people in the video say. They are not a tally from the production.
Another company hiring Beacon for this kind of video is buying an explanation of a program that is easy to misunderstand. An incubator, a contest, or a membership group can look like a night of applause. The next founder needs to know who it is for and what they can walk out with. A webpage can list the date. This video has the people who run it, and one team that went through it.
They did not need a highlight reel of the awards. They needed a short video that says what the competition is. That is what this video is for.
Read transcript Video dialogue and narration
[00:00.000] To create a new business is a fantastic thing. Every single day at Magnet we get to see entrepreneurs who come into our doors with the bravery, the passion, the excitement to make their ideas turn into businesses. We work with product focused companies, those that have something physical that one day they're going to want to manufacture. And we help those entrepreneurs think of the best way to do that the best way of creating their business. Sometimes this means that we
[00:34.320] help them vet their ideas. In fact we'll put them in front of a panel of judges, 20 judges sometimes, to push their idea further, to think of new ways of doing things and eventually to both fund and resource and help make that idea reality. Mspire is Magnet's annual startup pitch competition. Each year we invite physical product innovators from across Northeast Ohio to tell a room full of startup experts about their projects. Unlike most pitch competitions, point of Mspire is to connect these startups directly with the experts and resources
[01:09.520] they need. That could include strategic guidance through our iterator program, engineering help from our engineers, or support from experts like IP lawyers and marketers. This is just one of the unique ways Magnet supports innovation around the region. It's pretty great because you get a really wide variety of startups that come in. Some are very early with no sales and just an idea, some are much later on with many pre-orders and many sales. We have everyone from a marinade from Ghana to a self-programming welding robot and
[01:41.240] everything between and it's very cool to see. The idea behind our system is to create something that is like a human to interact with, something that's simple to use. There's a huge problem currently in the country in terms of a shortage of welders and current technology is unable to fill this void that we have. So our solution is to create a system that can fill the void, that can handle the jobs that some welders can do. The idea being simply you put something in front of the robot, the robot understands what to do right away. The Mspire competition was a phenomenal opportunity for us to really, you know, take a second look at our pitch
[02:16.480] deck hone in the sort of message that we wanted to convey to the first set of audiences and eventually deliver that message in front of a panel of phenomenal judges. We actually ended up connecting with our third co-founder through the Mspire competition where he first came on as an advisor after he saw his pitch and later ended up playing instead of coaching. So Mspire was a tremendous and transformational opportunity for us as a startup. Through this competition new products and new businesses are born and hopefully you'll be seeing those new
[02:48.800] products. Be they on your dinner table or be they the giant manufacturer that grows out of this new product and new idea that pushes Cleveland and Northeast Ohio's economy forward.
