I joined the Philippine Startup Challenge 7 in 2022, still in Grade 11. I couldn’t code, none of us had built a product, and yet somehow we found ourselves pitching a startup in a room full of college students.
Our idea was called MATHuto, an educational app on paper, but what we were actually obsessed with wasn’t math. It was why so many people hated it. The papers we read for the proposal kept making the same argument: early numeracy predicts later academic success, math anxiety starts young, and once kids decide they’re “not a math person” it’s hard to undo. So our conclusion was simple: maybe the problem isn’t children, it’s their first experiences with math.
Looking back, it’s funny how ambitious the proposal was: offline support, parental controls, monetization, and even augmented reality. When you haven’t built software before, every feature sounds essential because you’ve never had to build any of them. If someone pitched MATHuto to me today, I’d tell them to delete 90% of the feature list.
The competition itself was the real wake-up call. Most teams were college students from across Western Visayas, and we were one of the few senior high school teams there. Then the demos started. People had actual working prototypes, not just slides. I don’t remember who won or most of the judges’ questions, but I remember thinking, “we’re still talking about our ideas while these people already built theirs.” The teams that impressed me weren’t the ones with the smartest pitch. They had something real to show.
I didn’t leave PSC7 wanting to get better at pitching. I left wanting to learn how to build. We didn’t win anything, and MATHuto never became a real product, but it quietly changed the direction I was heading. A few years later, I wasn’t making pitch decks anymore. I was writing code.