And the Winner of February's Big Gig was....

Last Tuesday evening we hosted our 3rd and final regular-season virtual Big Gig Pitch-Off of the 2021/2022 season, and we had three great quality pitches!

The first entrepreneur of the night was Joan Drappeau of Slicpix. Slicpix helps marketers generate more revenue using patented interactive images to give visitors quick, easy pathways to information, sharing & purchase for each item on an image. Our second entrepreneur was Tyler Delargy, pictured right, of Real Time Reality, a service that streams authenticated 3D replicas of real people into any Web3 Metaverse experience securely and anonymously with full facial and body expression in real-time. Our third and final entrepreneur of the night was Heather Kenvin, pictured below, of Cardigan Associates. Through one-on-one affordable career coaching, they help women- caregivers, trailing partners, job changers- return to paid work and build meaningful careers.

In addition to our pitchers, we had three amazing business professionals judging the event and giving constructive feedback to the entrepreneurs. Our panel of judges included James Beaupré, Co-Founder of The Devil's Half Acre Distillery; Susan MacKay, Senior Program Manager at UMaine's Advanced Structures and Composites Center; and Dave Milan, retired Community Development Director for the Town of Orono and former member of the Big Gig Steering Committee.

While the judges deliberated, our "Big Rig" guest speaker, Charles Lever, of Tatum Talks had a Q&A session with our host, Renee Kelly, where he spoke about how he went from posting videos of his dog to becoming a viral Tik Tok sensation with over 3 million followers. After the virtual audience and judges voted for their favorite entrepreneurs, Joan Drappeau of Slicpix was named the winner and received the $500 sponsored by Bangor Savings Bank! She will move on to pitch in the Finale for $5,000 in April!

Thank you to our Bootstrapping Sponsors, Maine Technology Institute and Eaton Peabody, and other awesome sponsors, to our fantastic judges, and everyone that tuned in to watch! Be on the lookout for our Wild Card Competition on our social media soon and the Big Gig Pitch-Off Finale on April 12th!