Hitting the big-time
It’s been a very exciting few weeks recently, as we actually won the HSBC Unipreneur Competition we were talking about in our last blog, which meant we’ve won £20,000!
The idea we put forward was based round my partner Luke’s PHD work, which aims to correct colour blindness problems when looking at a computer screen. We’ve built a website for it and set it up as a business that we’re hoping to be able to sell.
Colour blindness affects 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, which is obviously quite a lot of the population. The product is for computers and mobile phones and takes the problem colours on screen and portrays them in a way that means that colour-blind people will be able to read and see information that otherwise they couldn’t interpret. It’s called ‘Huetility‘.
To get through to the final in Unipreneurs we went through quite a few stages; there was the initial application that got us through to the semi finals from about 400 other businesses. Then we had to go to London for the semi finals and demonstrate our product to six judges who came round the 20 businesses left. Based on that, 5 finalists were chosen to face a panel of judges including Peter Jones from Dragon’s Den and Wayne Hemmingway, the fashion designer. We were quite lucky on the night; they seemed really impressed with the product and gave us quite an easy ride in the questioning, compared to some of the other businesses! There were 200 people in the audience and they voted on who they thought the winner should be, and luckily they chose us!
There’s been a lot of national press on it, we’ve done loads of radio and local press interviews, one for the Mail on Sunday and the Guardian have been in touch to say they want to run an article on us. At the moment HSBC’s press agency are looking after our publicity, which means we’re getting some great exposure.
Winning the money is very good news as it means all the worries we had about how we were going to survive and afford to run the business have been answered and now we can just concentrate on getting it going and work full time on it. Watch this space…!
