CraftedCV

Five months ago, Michael Townsend couldn’t have imagined he’d be on stage at the No Boundaries pitch competition—not only pitching his company but also earning a thumbs-up and seed funding for his startup, CraftedCV.io.

Townsend, who is based in Evans, Georgia, works remotely for Microsoft as a principal software engineer and has a master’s degree in computer science, specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Software engineers tend to like to fix things that bug them. Back in January, Townsend was thinking about new ways to use AI. He realized a pain point was resume writing. A stat that blew him away is the fact that for every job, 250 resumes are submitted, and 200 of these are immediately rejected, unseen by human eyes, because of Applicant Tracking Systems.

Resume writing companies exist, but “they tell you what's wrong with your resume, and maybe some keywords to use, but they don't just do the work for you,” said Townsend. “And I was annoyed by that, and then realized, ‘Wait, I have the skill set to do something about that.”

That’s how he started CraftedCV.io—which uses the power of AI to write resumes that get past automated Applicant Tracking Systems.

Within an hour, he had a working website. Three weeks later, his product—which rewrites resumes to help a person match their strengths to specific job descriptions—was built, and he posted about it on LinkedIn. “And you know, within a couple of weeks, over 100 people were using it,” he said. “I was getting feedback from real people who had been fired from Meta a week before, who were actually running their resumes through my system, then passing them off to a career coach, who would annotate them with all their thoughts. Then they were sending me back the annotated version as feedback for how well I was doing.

“The feedback was really positive, and I was like, it’s actually helping people. Let’s see where this could go.”

— Michael Townsend

That’s where his connections to Augusta’s theClubhou.se—and its Make Startups spin-off, a business incubator—paid off. Townsend had found a mentor and his first coding job thanks to theClubhou.se, a coworking and networking space, and had met cofounder Eric Parker at an event. It had been a few years, but Townsend happened to see a post by Parker announcing the No Boundaries pitch competition, presented by Wells Fargo and created by Make Startups, with support from the Aiken Chamber of Commerce, the South Carolina Research Authority, PD Newsom Private Capital, LLC, and others.

The pitch competition was designed to showcase how businesses can thrive on both sides of the Savannah River, awarding prizes of $10,000, $5,000, $3,000, and $2,000 to four winning startups. But before he applied, Townsend reached out to Parker. “I was like, ‘Hey, I'm going to apply, but I don't know what I'm doing. I've never built a business. I've never built a pitch deck. So, he mentioned CofounderOS.”

CofounderOS is a software solution built by Make Startups that helps entrepreneurs understand what it takes to launch and run a successful business—by quantifying entrepreneurial skills, evaluating their business for investors and banks, providing feedback on how founders can improve, and even predicting revenue generation. To help him write responses to questions provided by CofounderOS—such as “What is your business strategy?”, “How do you communicate it?”, “What is your go-to-market strategy?”—Townsend turned to AI, uploading screenshots from his website and other information to a project folder in ChatGPT. CofounderOS then gave him feedback, so that Townsend could refine the responses. Not only could he then use that information for his No Boundaries application and his pitch deck, but “it was helping me craft all my business strategy. Now I know what to say when people ask me these questions.”

For the hook of his actual on-stage pitch, he turned to his brother-in-law, who is actively looking for a new job, to help tell the story of all the raw emotions you feel during a job search.

CraftedCV.io earned third place and a $2,000 prize from No Boundaries, which had nearly 60 applicants, with 10 entrepreneurs from across the Southeast chosen to pitch on stage. That money will go right back into his business. But Townsend said the biggest takeaways are this: “So it helped a couple of ways. I built CraftedCV.io in a bubble. Now I know businesspeople see this as a potential, real company. So that was validating. Then, there are local venture capital firms that I knew nothing about. One of them had a fantastic idea to help grow the company, and now there’s someone I’m bringing on board to help me pursue this.”

So, what does No Boundaries mean to him? “I always have a lot of ideas about businesses, but before Wednesday, they always seemed like an intangible dream. They were fun to think about and get excited about and maybe even write some code. No Boundaries was the first time it seemed like this could actually be my life.”

Pool Protection Technologies

Back in summer 2021, University of Georgia freshman Garrett Stigall was back at his pool-cleaning job in his hometown of Richmond Hill, Georgia, when he noticed that the price of chlorine had shot up from $1 a pound to $8 a pound. 

It was a huge problem for his clients. So, the engineering major decided to come up with a solution. 

That brainstorm turned into S.A.M., an award-winning algae prevention system that uses ultrasonic technology to help prevent algae growth by up to 70% and reduce the need for expensive chlorine, saving pool owners up to $1,400 a year. 

Importantly, S.A.M. also reduces the significant environmental and health risks associated with traditional pool chemical use. That includes long-term respiratory issues from swimming in over-chlorinated pools, tens of thousands of acres of permanently damaged ecosystems, and hundreds of thousands of acres harmed due to chemical runoff and wastewater discharge from pools.

Now, S.A.M. has also earned Stigall and his Savannah-based company, Pool Protection Technologies, several accolades, such as recognition by Pool Magazine as a “New Product to Watch Out For.” Most recently, Stigall earned second place and $3,000 at the No Boundaries pitch competition, presented by Wells Fargo and created by theClubhou.se’s Make Startups entrepreneur support system, in partnership with the Aiken Chamber of Commerce and others.

Stigall graduated in May 2024 and jumped right into running Pool Protection Technologies full-time. As a young startup, he and his partner, Guy Gober, are working to figure out ways to create the device more efficiently and cost-effectively, as well as how to market it. 

Some funding has been available. During college, Stigall presented at over 100 pitch competitions, earning nearly $250,000 for his company. Pool Protection Technologies is now working out of an 80,000-square-foot manufacturing space. To date, he’s sold about 100 devices at $999.

No Boundaries came at the right time to help them expand their ecosystem. Stigall says that No Boundaries is different from any pitch competition that he’s been a part of, starting with the application process. “Usually, it’s just that you’re in or you’re out. This one, even if they didn't let you in, they gave you individualized feedback, not just for the entire thing, but for every response, which I thought was really cool,” he said. “Then, if you got in, we had to do an interview process, so we had time to understand what they liked and what they didn't like to prepare ourselves for the interview because of the feedback from the responses.” 

That feedback is also helping them with aspects of running their day-to-day business. “One of the questions that we got graded low on was marketing,” said Stigall. “The feedback was that we need to be more in-depth on who our competition is. You know, we're over here saying our competition is just any other of these natural pool algae elimination products, but they said, ‘No, your competition is also chlorine and salt.’”

As a result, the company is changing its advertising strategy. Instead of focusing its messaging on being a natural pool cleaner, new messages will state that it’s an alternative to chlorine. “We're going to see if this more blatant approach is going to help get the message across to our potential customers,” said Stigall.

Stigall adds that PPT is in an initial fundraising round to help add staff and to switch from 3D printing to injection molding to help reduce the cost per unit. But his goals are bigger than that, and it’s in part due to No Boundaries. “The takeaway I've gotten from every single pitch competition is not the money, it's growing the entrepreneurship network,” he said. 

“In the small amount of time I've been able to see how theClubhou.se and Make Startups operate, they are the best entrepreneurship resource in this region,” said Stigall. “I don’t say that lightly. They know that while it's great to provide resources or workshops or events, for the entrepreneurship journey, it's just as important to find connections with other entrepreneurs. theClubhou.se has figured out a formula that I am absolutely in love with, and I want to continue to be a part of that ecosystem.”

GreenCape Health

In the U.S., there’s a health care crisis of too many patients and not enough doctors. 

About seven years ago, Daniel Solomon, MD, MPH, was exploring ideas with his colleagues on how to address this problem. Digital health was just getting started, and suddenly, the rheumatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School had a brainstorm: What if a doctor could reach out to a patient two weeks beforehand and say, “It looks like you're doing great. Why don't we postpone this visit for a few months?”—and then fill that spot with a new patient or a flaring patient? Or, on the other hand, what if a patient wasn’t doing well on an expensive medication, and a doctor could know that information in real time, before the next appointment?

In other words, instead of flying blind, what if a digital health solution could deliver better visibility of patients’ symptoms between visits and make health care more efficient? 

The answer to that question, mPRO by GreenCape Health, was recently recognized with a $5,000 prize from the No Boundaries Pitch Competition, presented by Wells Fargo and created by Make Startups, with support from the Aiken Chamber of Commerce and others. 

After his brainstorm, Solomon started exploring the possibilities. He found a software development team to help him create a custom app so patients could self-report symptoms and disease activity. Three clinical trials and multiple papers later, Solomon was ready to take the app to the next level. 

That’s where Mark Elfers comes in. Elfers is a former Marine who has worked in biotech, including a digital health solution for palliative care with support from the Mass General Brigham Innovation Team. Meanwhile, Solomon had also met with the same innovation team, which helps Harvard investigators and innovators turn ideas into companies. The team made introductions, and the two men clicked, immediately starting to figure out how to bring the app to market.

After Elfers brought in Jim Bickelhaupt, whom he’d worked with previously, as chief product/technology officer, the company—GreenCape Health—was born. GreenCape is headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, and is a member of the South Carolina Research Authority, which awarded a product development grant to GreenCape Health. That, along with a grant from Mass General and funding from private investors, helped the company grow to a position where it could land a partnership with Articularis Health Care Group, the nation’s largest rheumatology practice network, with clinics in 10 states. 

Soon after, a LinkedIn post by the SCRA alerted Elfers to the No Boundaries pitch contest. “I apply to pitch contests all the time,” said Elfers. But what he loved about No Boundaries was “there was this kind of cross boundary with South Carolina and Georgia, since one of the practices that we're live with is in Sandy Springs, Georgia. I like the idea of regional economic development opportunities and participating in their efforts, hoping we can contribute in a small way to helping them achieve their goals. It seemed like a great opportunity to be mutually beneficial.”

One of those benefits was the feedback from the CofounderOS platform. Each application was fed through CofounderOS, an AI-powered tool developed by Make Startups that generated comments on each applicant’s responses to questions like “Describe your marketing strategy” and “Who is your target audience,” and graded those responses. 

Even for someone like Elfers, who is used to pitching in front of audiences one-on-one, the feedback “is valuable,” he says. “Part of being a successful startup founder is knowing that you don’t know everything. What I like about the CofounderOS platform is that it’s memorialized … it’s there in black and white, where sometimes verbal feedback—it’s tough to quantify or know what to do with it because it can be vague.” 

For example, CofounderOS noted that his pitch could benefit from bringing up the sales strategy sooner. “It was like, of course, that’s an important thing you should try to incorporate as soon as you can. Founders want to talk a lot about their product, and for us, the fact that Dr. Solomon built it and studied it, that’s great. But are investors really thinking about that? I thought that was really handy.” 

And, he added, “For a young startup like us to get in front of real humans and then to hear really insightful questions from these seasoned panelists and to give them the answer, it just makes you better able to do that same thing in the future. So, the overall experience just improves your ability to sell your business to investors the next time.”

GreenCape Health is already moving on to that next phase: a seed capital round with investors up and down the East Coast. 

And the pitch is already writing itself. “We’ve all been a patient, and I think it resonates when I say you're only in focus with your care team when you are about two feet from them. One second after you leave the office, you're a memory. But with our patient-reported outcomes platform, doctors can say, ‘It’s helpful for us to know what's going on with our patient population and help them even when they're not in front of us.’ And the patients say, ‘Great, now I can communicate more clearly how I’m doing between my face-to-face.’ The patients get that, and I think the folks in the audience and the panelists at No Boundaries agreed.”

S.C.H.O.O.L.S

According to national data, the average college student graduates with more than $40,000 in loan debt. Add in medical or other professional degrees, and debt can soar to $200,000 or more.

But what if your child could get an academic scholarship to cover most—if not all—of their college fees?

Dr. Valencia Belle, who scored a 26 on the ACT when she was just 12 years old—that’s better than 83% of test takers, by the way—saw an opportunity. So did the judges and audience at the No Boundaries Pitch Competition, presented by Wells Fargo and created by Make Startups, with support from the Aiken Chamber of Commerce and others.

Belle earned first place and a $10,000 prize for her startup company, S.C.H.O.O.L.S., which provides online test preparation to K-12 students so they can master the ACT, SAT and other standardized tests; raise their ACT scores by an average of 5 to 10 points and their SAT scores by 100 to 200 points in just five weeks; and change their college dreams from “if” to “where and when.”

S.C.H.O.O.L.S. was profitable from the start, says Belle, who initially focused on school systems and districts in five states that received funding for test prep for students through Title I—although she now serves clients globally, from Nigeria to Australia. She built the business on her own methodology, honed from years of personal and professional experience, which includes a master's in family system integration and a doctorate in education (she wrote her dissertation on helping nontraditional students raise their ACT scores and changed state policy in the process).

The program is designed for children as young as third grade up to adults who must retake standardized tests to meet job requirements.

Prepping early before the pressure of the junior year of high school is essential, says Belle. “The majority of these tests are eighth-grade information, and the reason that students do so poorly in the 11th or 12th grade when they're taking it is because the information is there, but it's so far back in their intuitiveness. One of the secret sauces for what we do with test prep is bringing to the forefront the information that they've already been taught but have not mastered,”—along with preparing them for the rigor of a four-hour test.

Belle has participated in six pitch competitions and won all six, including No Boundaries. The experience, she says, was exceptional. “They really want to help us to expand and to put us in an ecosystem of people who really understand and want to support new businesses,” Belle said.

That support includes CoFounderOS, an AI-fueled platform created by Make Startups to help evaluate businesses, their viability, and future revenue generation. Anyone can sign up to use CoFounderOS, but Make Startups leveraged the platform to evaluate and provide feedback to all the startups that applied to No Boundaries. “It’s probably the only pitch competition where I had an interface with something like that,” said Belle. “If I had gone to this pitch competition first, it probably would have changed the way I did my pitch deck, because the questions were preparing you to have a business. They shape the way that you think about whether this is going to be a business that works. Founders who have the opportunity to interact with CoFounderOS would be able to tell the difference between whether this is a hobby or if this is something I want to do as a business.”

From the beginning, Belle self-financed S.C.H.O.O.L.S., and this past year earned $1 million in contracts. But she’s looking to scale. And that’s where No Boundaries is also playing a part. For most competitions, you pitch and may earn a prize, and that’s it—you don’t typically get to meet all the other businesses, the judges, or audience members. “I have so many people I met at No Boundaries,” she said. “I’m now doing the ACT for some of their children. I’ve registered students for the NCAA eligibility center. I’ve met with one of the investors, who’s taken me under his wing, and I met some of his partners this evening. So, when they say ‘no boundaries,’ they meant what they said.”

She also met someone who gave her an idea for a new business opportunity. “He said, ‘My company pays benefits for families. I really want to know: How can I, as a business owner, give my employees access to test prep?’ And I was like, ‘Say no more.’ I’m meeting with a company I met at No Boundaries to discuss giving them access to our subscriptions, which their HR department will use as a benefit for their employees. So that came out of No Boundaries, because I never even thought about that as a vertical.”

Next is an initial fundraising round to help scale her business, but at a pace where she can stay focused on the passion behind it. “As long as I stay focused on that, the rest will come when it's supposed to come.”

She’s always seen the need: families stuck in the cycle of generational poverty, parents and grandparents taking out backbreaking loans to send their children to school, and children struggling to change their circumstances but crippled by debt in the process.

“It's just so humbling for me, because now I'm seeing my babies that started five years ago, and they're sending me all these notes like, ‘Miss Belle, I just graduated from medical school debt-free. That’s so incredible. That’s why it’s so important for them to take ownership of how these tests determine certain things they can and cannot do.”