I joined the Philippine Startup Challenge 7 in 2022 when I was 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.
People would probably describe it as another educational app, but that wasn’t really the point. What we were obsessed with wasn’t math itself. It was why so many people hated it.
When we started reading papers for the proposal, we kept finding the same argument. Early numeracy predicts later academic success. Math anxiety starts young. Once children convince themselves they’re “not a math person,” it’s surprisingly hard to undo.
So our conclusion was simple: maybe the problem isn’t children. Maybe it’s their first experiences with math.
That’s what MATHuto tried to address.
Looking back now, I laugh at how ridiculously ambitious the proposal was. We had progression systems, achievements, offline support, parental controls, monetization, statistics dashboards, even augmented reality, and I don’t even remember what else.
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 probably tell them to delete 90% of the feature list. Nobody cares about your achievement system until you’ve proven people even want your product.
The competition itself was the real wake-up call.
Most teams were college students from across Western Visayas, while we were one of the few senior high school teams there. Then the demos started.
People had actual prototypes. Working software, not just slides.
I don’t remember who won, and I don’t remember most of the judges’ questions. What I do remember is walking around 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 were the ones who had something real to show.
I didn’t leave PSC7 wanting to become better at pitching.
I left wanting to learn how to build.
In hindsight, that’s probably the most valuable thing I got out of the competition. 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 spending my time making pitch decks anymore.
I was writing code.