The Perfect Pitch, will be the closing event of London’s FT Innovate this month, and we are pleased to announce our partnership with Seedrs & the Financial Times for this occasion.

The idea has been likened to Dragon’s Den meets X Factor. 3 digital tech startups will be pitching their businesses for real money, before a live audience of 300+ observant investors (along with a few thousand that are expected online).
They will also be under the scrutiny of an expert panel, including Associate Editor at the FT, Lucy Kellaway and co-founder of Virgin Mobile, Joe Steel.

While the pitches take place, eager investors can register their interest for the startup in real time, just with the use of their tablet or smartphone.

CookiesHQ have the pleasure of collaborating with The Perfect Pitch to deliver the technical side of this.

We are currently in the process of creating a responsive web application that allows users to invest real money in their chosen pitch. It will also display a breakdown of live investment data on a projector screen before the audience.

The challenges here are multiple. We expect large spikes of traffic to the app lasting for ~3 minutes (the allocated pitch / investment time) and the audience will primarily be using congested WIFI or 3/4G networks. On top of this, we need to make the app so quick and effortless to use that investors can’t get distracted and will actually enjoy the live show in front of them.

On a technical level this will be a nightmare. On an engineering level however, it’s probably a dream come true!

It’s not everyday that you get to partner with organisations like the Financial Times or Seedrs, but we consider ourselves extremely lucky to be a part of this adventure.

If you are planning to attend FT Innovate, let us know and maybe we can find some time to have a chat. Meanwhile, I will get back to my coding.