Our reality TV elimination story

In September 2026, I was in one of our regular standups for oro when someone brought up Stan Launchpad. They were selecting 100 founders to scale their startups to revenue and compete for 100K.

For some context, oro is the startup I joined pre-product in my 2A at Waterloo (Feb 2026). I met Sunny, the co-founder, through her posts on LinkedIn about working on oro. The idea inspired me so I reached out, we grabbed coffee, and I joined as a founding eng.

And by the 3rd month I was working across product and ops. Finally by September, I became a co-founder alongside Sunny.

We found out about Stan Launchpad. A reality TV show where you get 2 weeks to scale your startup. This was genuinely such a crazy concept and it made me quite intimidated to be honest LOL

And many many times over the next week I would think about applying. There were thoughts I kept going back to over and over again:

• I wouldn't fit into the community
• I would look hella goofy on camera

So many many times I would consider backing out of applying.

The funny thing is, it really just came down to my hair. As much as I preach about self-love and confidence, the main thing holding me back was my fear of looking chudded on TV. Although I try not to think too hard about it, the insecurity ALWAYS comes back.

But you know what? I will never ever let my appearance be the obstacle to an opportunity. Out of everything that could possibly be in my way, I'd never let hair be a reason I'd quit.

Applying

Finally the week of the application deadline, I applied with Sunny. I remember filming our video application at the Tesla office that day. It was 9pm and I was once again alone in the office. We spent a good 2 hours perfecting that video (although it was far from perfect haha)

After a full week of waiting, we finally got the news that WE WERE IN!!!

Prep

The 2 weeks before launchpad were lowkey some of the most brutal work days I've ever had. I would:

• wake up at 8-9 am every day and go to work
• do Tesla work until 5-6pm
• skip lunchtime to work on oro
• eat dinner at the office
• work on oro until 1am
• go home, work on content, sleep, repeat

I genuinely lived and breathed code every single day.

I re-started making content in preparation, and I genuinely forgot how much time the whole process takes LMAO

You might be reading this, thinking "wow that's lowkey crazy, especially if she doesn't win." But I think not.

I will tell you that I went in, 100% confident we had a shot at the 100K.

Call me delusional LOL :P

My manager was lowkey so chill and supportive of the whole thing. And to be honest, I do owe a part of my success here to him as well haha

Throughout the weeks leading up to it, we had a few meetings scheduled with all the contestants. It was there we met Max from Hivemind Research. He declared alliances and even sent us a video with captions introducing himself. What an absolute menace :)

We also had some interviews with Tien, the producer, and Keegan, a skitmaster on the Beast team.

IN NEW YOORRKKKKK

I flew out to NYC Friday (Oct 2nd) afternoon.

I sat next to this high school chem professor on my flight there haha. We started talking about his work and how he was noticing that AI was affecting his students. You could tell he genuinely cared about what he did. He used to work in research with labs, became a manager, and then took a fat pay cut to teach underserved students in SF. Overall pretty cool guy.

I pulled out my laptop to work on oro, fixing up mascot designs and pushing a PR or 2. It didn't take long for my laptop to die before I switched to editing videos on my phone.

I arrived at JFK at 10 PM. Pulled up in an uber to our airbnb in a pretty peaceful neighbourhood in New Jersey.

When I got there, I was greeted with oro merch packaged at the doorstep. I had designed the hoodie and tote just a few days prior, staying up until 2 am just to get the design out. We literally went from ideating to purchase within the day. Shoutout Custom Ink for shipping this order out so quickly!! I think if you were to see this design today, you would not have imagined what our old designs looked like (because it was so ugly in comparison) -> this is what I call growth LMAO! If you watched my unboxing video, you could probably tell how excited I was to see this new vision really come to life.

Ended up uber eating a Subway and devouring that while doing more work before passing out for the night.

Sunny arrived the next morning. She took a red-eye flight, but somehow didn't sleep the entire way here. We spent the entire day filming content, yapping about our goals and motivation, and planning our 2 intense weeks together. We made a whole linear project, with milestones and tickets detailed to the exact dates and posts.

We swore we'd stick to this timeline and get 2 separate product launches in within the next 2 weeks.

Day 1

Waking up at 7 AM on Sunday (Oct 4th), we rushed out of our airbnb with massive luggages to arrive at the pickup spot. Sunny and I wore our new oro hoodies loud and proud!

It was easy to spot the crew. 100 founders and even more team members crowding around a few coach buses. Did the usual logistics: checked in, met our camp counsellor, talked to some other founders.

We hopped on the bus, hoping to get some work done before the chaos started. We were able to! But we also spoke to Vitoria, founder of Linkable30 (she has an incredible story btw), and mingled with a few other competitors. Our cabin-mate, Paige, sat behind us with her teammate Ying.

10 minutes away from arriving, the bus erupted into a party. Jonathan, another counsellor, pulled out someone's speaker and started blasting music. Amancio, a Spanish team of 2, bursted out in songs, pulling out their drums and really brought up the vibes. We partied the whole way to the camp site.

When we pulled up, the camera crew was waiting for us. We volunteered to film a hype segment with them. Yelling and screaming as we passed by cameras, showing off our brand and our vibes.

The campsite sat along a big lake, surrounded by woods, cabins scattered everywhere. The cold air hit different the second we stepped off the bus. We'd be shivering for most of the next 2 weeks.

When we got our cabin, it turned out that some miscommunication put me in a private one, away from Sunny. But after some discussions, I ended up getting placed back in there with them. There were a good 10 beds on either side of the cabin. Sunny and I lived on one side, while Paige lived on the other, connected by a long washroom section. On our beds we found our purple Stan merch, a nice water bottle, and our name plaques. We barely had time to settle before putting on our new hoodies (that we would wear almost every single day LOL). It was time for our first meeting at the Barn, a building we would spend every morning at for the next 14 days.

Sunny and I grabbed our seats at the back left of the room. Our names printed on a wooden plaque. A small stage with hanging screens sat in front of us, the anticipation killing us.

John and Vitali showed up. We hip hip hooray'd. They shared their story, gave us our first challenge, and sent us off to eat at the Lodge.

Day 2

The first challenge was to create 3 pieces of content, 1 of which (short form) would be judged by John himself. Completion was worth 75 points, and the singular video would be graded on another 75 point scale. Submission due at midnight.

We decided to submit 2 LinkedIn posts first. Got that out of the way by 12 PM.

John came by to our table, where we asked him for some feedback on our content. He gave us really good advice about formats and what was wrong with our content. He seemed to have great expectations for us.

When it came to the founder-led content, Sunny decided to take that on. She scripted and filmed a whole video with the 2 of us, before scrapping that (for the challenge) and re-scripting and editing a whole new video. We had standup with the team that night, which took an hour. So it was 11:30 PM. And she was roughly halfway done editing. I remember sitting there with the submission form filled in, waiting for her final piece of content.

It was then 11:45 PM. I started lowkey begging her to just finish up and send whatever she had.

Then it was 11:50. The ending was barely finished, I told her to just use stock videos instead of b-roll to get it done.

11:55 PM. She starts exporting.

11:57 PM. She uploads it to Instagram.

11:58 PM. We pull up the exact time on google and stare at it.

The next 2 minutes were some of the longest I had ever experienced. The Instagram upload bar refused to budge past 90% and things started looking a little cooked. I took her phone outdoors hoping there would be just slightly better signal.

11:59:00 PM.

11:59:20 PM. Instagram finally uploaded. I ran back indoors, refreshed my page and submitted.

11:59:35 PM was the submission time.

Day 3

Ok so this was the day things got real.

The results from the content challenge came in, and John absolutely roasted us in front of every single founder. The video quality wasn't up to par, he said it was below our usual standard, and the worst part was that we had talked to him beforehand, got his feedback, and still submitted something we knew wasn't ready.

It hit Sunny the hardest tho. She had made the video and she already knew it wasn't good enough. I ran to the washroom (to pee) and came back to find her crying behind the cabin with Alexa. The producers called us for an interview, and Sunny was still in tears. They asked me "how does it feel to see your cofounder like this?" so I also started crying. And we were literally just bawling with cameras in our faces.

I think this was the slap in my face for how much I cared about Sunny. Not as a co-founder, but as a friend.

See... I would've never cried in this situation, but seeing Sunny devastated and demotivated, genuinely made me so so frustrated. You'll have to watch the show to hear what I said to her but I'd say it was pretty heartfelt haha

And I think it was in that moment I realized how close our co-founder dynamic truly is

Anyways, this was also the first elimination night. 10 teams were going to be eliminated.

We gathered around a bonfire in the freezing cold, where John and Vitali revealed the names of eliminated teams one-by-one. John started off the session by asking us "oro team, how are you feeling." To which we both chuckled a little and responded "much better haha".

Eliminated teams had to stand in front of John and Vitali on a red carpet, where they would hear every single thing that was wrong with their submission. Vitali would then hand the team their wooden plaque, for them to throw it into the fire.

One team, MyMark (a solo team, Rey), straight up refused to give up. He bargained with John and Vitali before finally leaving his plaque before the fire. He urged them to reconsider, which Vitali swiftly declined by tossing his plaque into the fire anyways.

As Vitali moved up the leaderboard from the bottom, my heart skipped a beat. Every time he would turn a plaque, I felt my heart drop. My hand clasped onto Sunny's, the cold almost didn't seem to matter anymore. And with every turn, I would let out a breath of relief.

We were 18th.

Day 4-9

These days were the grind. We would get points for:

• social media posts (max 5/day)
• customer interviews (max 10)
• sales from customer calls (max 10)

And milestones gave massive points:

• public launch
• 3 new features built and posted about
• first 3 sales
• 10 customer interviews completed

We went down every single person on our waitlist and messaged them. We managed to schedule around 40 calls in those few days.

On Day 4, we had not done a singular sales call prior to Launchpad. We jumped into the whole thing completely blind, gave discounts, literally begged, and at the end of it all we closed 1/10 calls.

The next day, we asked Vitali for help, and in just 15 minutes he lowkey changed everything with one piece of advice:

Stop asking customers to help solve your problems. Start figuring out how you can solve theirs.

Before, our calls were all about us. We'd ask people about their problems, validate our assumptions, show them oro, and hope they'd want to pay. We even asked them what they felt was missing from our product!

So we flipped it. We wrote a call script:

• start with small talk
• ask about their problem
• show them the solution
• ask them for payment

Same product, same team, completely different framing, and our close rate for the next 3 days jumped to 90%. We went from $0 to $4K ARR in 3 days.

I used to think having a sales script would make conversations feel robotic, but turns out having a structure actually makes it easier to listen.

Day 10

I experienced one of the most stressful things in my life here, and there's not many things that stress me out this much LMAO

Unfortunately we entered an NDA regarding this with Stan so you won't be hearing about it :3

Day 11

They switched to eliminations via revenue. Every dollar was worth a point. This was pretty fucked because we were B2C, and not even launched.

Our next priority was to launch. I stayed up all night for this. Spent like 4 hours making our launch video, which was motion graphics, something I'd never done before. It actually did pretty well LMAO. I set up our Product Hunt for the first time and scheduled it. Turns out I missed the 3 AM deadline for the day so it had to launch a day later.

We messaged literally every single person we knew begging them to comment and engage with our LinkedIn launch post. And it did really really well because of that.

Sunny and I spent a huge chunk of time fixing up our landing page, onboarding, and the paywall. It was a crazy rush.

Day 12

Morning of the launch, our onboarding was still not ready. We had scheduled it for 10:30 AM and told all of our friends and family the day before.

I was sooooo flipping stressed man. Our deploy pipeline takes ~10 min to run, which is crazy IK, and watching the clock tick down was painful.

At 10:30 AM, we were still not ready, the user states from onboarding just weren't working because it was pretty entangled with our previous waitlisting structure.

It finally worked at 11:30 AM.

We then spent the next hour messaging everyone again with our launch links. Skipped lunch.

It was 5 PM. We realized that we were NOT going to win, or even get close to being elimination safe, from just promoting our product. We needed another way to get revenue.

Inspired by Memoe (Jia and Angie) who were running ad spaces and selling their domain names, Sunny and I said screw it and decided to pivot.

No more oro promotion. We became an ad merch agency.

At 7 PM, I started coding up a page on our website to support merch ad space bidding. Sunny started contacting friends to buy some ad space. She ended up getting a mayoral candidate for Waterloo, Jerry, to buy a few blocks.

At 10 PM, the site was done. Scrappy, barely functional, but done.

One of the fun parts about our ad space merch was that you could outbid other people. A grid starts at $10 but you can purchase it off someone else for $11. To buy it back you'd pay the difference.

Sunny sent out reels, posts, everything on social media. She filmed like 4 reels in one sitting that night. I was fixing up the non-functional site while she began promoting.

Day 13

One of my most stressful mornings.

Orders came in and people wanted their images on our hoodie. I actually didn't support image uploads through the website, so I was manually making graphics for people, deploying them to our site, and then running SQL queries directly in our database to update the slots that people purchased.

2 people REALLLLLY went at it with the outbidding. It was awesome seeing them so invested, but it was also hella hard to keep up with all of their updates hahaha

The submission deadline for revenue was 2 PM. We ended up making ~$1,000 in those few hours.

But uh anyways we were eliminated :3

Actually didn't feel any sadness. We knew going into elimination night that we weren't going to make it, but we had done everything we possibly could, and there was genuinely nothing more we could have given. It was pretty zen.

When we walked around the fire to get to our seats, everyone cheered for us the entire way there, and that was real family. We were no longer competing with each other, we were just friends supporting everyone in everything we do. Shivering in the cold, surrounded by the glow of the bonfire and the sound of 100 people cheering your name even after you lost, that was maybe the most beautiful moment of my entire time there.

You'll see this too in my philosophy, effort is the prize. You can't control the outcome, you can't control the judges, you can't control how much money other teams raise. Even luck is always a factor.

But you can control how much of yourself you pour into the thing, and if you poured in everything, then you already won.

I mean, sure didn't walk away with 100K. But we walked away knowing there was genuinely nothing left on the table, and that feeling is worth more than any prize money could ever be.

Day 14 - end

Yeah we lowkey slacked off for the rest of the days. We worked on our pitch deck (which still needs A LOT of work) and practiced our pitches for the first time. Sunny and I went tubing. I tried waterskiing and ate shit. I yapped with Daniel Kim, an absolutely goated creator. And I ate good, did not sleep good.

Watched the other teams' pitches and realized how much we were missing in our own skills. But honestly we were just taking it chill so I didn't even really fix it LOL

Remember that linear project we made? Yeah not a single ticket was checked off by the end of the 2 weeks. We did so much more, and less, than what we thought was possible

End

I think the story back in NYC is not as interesting. We went to eat ramen and I got some NYC pizza before flying out.

These people were absolutely amazing. I've yapped so much up till this point but I'd still not be able to convey the ambience and emotions I felt there. To be surrounded by such an incredible group of people, at such a beautiful campsite, where every single day felt like a whole year of learning, was genuinely one of the biggest blessings of my life. I never expected to grow so much in such a short amount of time, but here I am.

So so so much love goes out to John and Vitali for making this show a reality. And so so so much love to every single person who supported us along the way, especially when we were down.

You guys are the best. I'll come back to this maybe 10 years from now and relive every moment.

Maybe the opportunities we grow the most fond of are also the most stressful, the most fearful, the most difficult of our experiences. But I think the challenge and struggle is what makes it so wonderful, because the things worth doing are never the easy ones.

There's beauty in human suffering.

So here's to the suffering we will go through, over and over and over again.

oro to the moon :)