Speaking with Confidence in Singapore: The Art of Not Winging It

“On this Friday 22nd of May 2026., pitchMe will receive an award under SUTD’s BSF programme.”

A modest sentence is it not?

Think about the last time you had a really good idea. Maybe it was a project proposal, a business concept, or just a better way of doing something at work. Now think about what happened when you tried to explain it to someone else.

Awards are funny things. They appear at the end of the story, but they are never really the story itself. The award is the visible bit. The ribbon. The photograph. The handshake. The sentence posted online on LinkedIn to show you’re a trustworthy adult. The real story is everything that happened before anyone even ever noticed. 

For us, this recognition from SUTD’s BSF programme is more than a pleasing milestone. It is a reminder that the work we are doing matters. It tells us that the problem we are trying to solve is not imaginary, not ornamental, and not some indulgent little “soft skill” floating around the edges of real achievement.

The "Weird but Lowkey Genius" of It All

Here is the part that delighted us. The category we won is officially called the Hidden Gem Award. The emcee, in a rather wonderful act of honesty, described it as recognising teams who were "weird but lowkey genius". 

We are a small team. We have no marketing department, no glossy launch video, and a rather healthy suspicion of self-importance. So, when the judges describe our work as having "left a lasting impression", we notice. We’d notice a lot.

The full citation, for those who prefer their accolades properly worded, reads: "Our Hidden Gem Award celebrates teams that quietly impressed us through their creativity, execution, and results. They may have flown under the radar, but their work left a lasting impression."

We did not enter the BSF programme expecting to win anything. We entered because we believed in what we were building.

On the Quiet Business of Persisting

Startups, rather like first dates, can lose their way quickly if you forget why you turned up at all. So this seems an appropriate moment to remind ourselves, and to admit out loud, why we keep at it.

We are still here because great ideas, the ones that could change a classroom, an industry, or some small corner of someone's life, are very often not the ones spoken about. They are the ones quietly held by someone too unsure to say them well, too anxious to push through the silence, or too convinced that the room is full of cleverer people. 

We are still here because the world is positively groaning with brilliant people whose brilliance has been smothered by a stage, a microphone, or the appalling silence that follows the words "any questions?". One could fill a small library with the careers that were never launched, all because someone perfectly capable of changing things was unable to say so without their voice betraying them halfway through.

And we are still here because the alternative, which is to shrug and say "well, some people are simply better at this sort of thing", is the kind of polite untruth that has done quite enough damage to quite enough people already. Practice, the deliberate kind with the right sort of feedback, makes nearly anyone better. We rather believe that and we intend to keep proving it.

What Next, Then?

We are in the business of helping people become genuinely better at saying what they mean, so the work they have laboured over is not lost in the small, terrifying gap between brain and microphone.

If you happen to run a school, a polytechnic, a university, or one of those increasingly self-aware organisations that has noticed its best ideas keep dying in its worst presentations, our door is, as one says, ajar. And if you happen to be a student who has ever silently wished a presentation could simply be submitted as a PDF and never spoken of again, well, I suspect we have rather a lot to discuss.

In the meantime, we shall carry on doing what we do, which is to listen rather carefully to other people's voices and quietly suggest they trust them a little more.