Ninety Seconds, Zero Revenue, One Win: Wayfarer at Founders Live

A year ago (almost to the day), on the streets of New York City, I was learning (the hard way) that most mobility aids aren’t built for real life.

They’re designed as medical equipment first and personal equipment never. Clunky, impractical, and built without much consideration for everyday logistics. Add rain/snow-slick sidewalks, crowded intersections, and the indignities of travel (like almost losing crutches on a flight), and the gap becomes more and more obvious: mobility support should be functional, stylish, and genuinely usable.

I went looking for the brand that had already solved it, ready to be a customer. But no one had.

So we started building Wayfarer Mobility.

This February, I had the opportunity to pitch Wayfarer at Founders Live in just 90 seconds.

Ninety seconds is short. Like, very, very short. And it demands ruthless editing. Every line has to earn its place. I thought being a copywriter would make this process easy, but it turns out writing for speech is very different from any other kind of writing. I spent an unreasonable amount of time turning a big, personal, messy origin story into something clean enough to carry in a minute and a half.

Luckily, I didn’t need to do it on my own. I worked closely with confidence and communications coach, Ashleigh Paholek, to get it there: tightening language, stripping out the filler, sharpening the sequence, practising until it stopped sounding like I was practising. Over and over: write, read, time it, cut, repeat.

On the night, I pitched alongside five other founders, each building something strong and far more established than us. But… the room voted, and Wayfarer won. And I haven’t won anything since being a student of the week in 2009.

I left with a big shock of confidence and a much greater sense of responsibility. A room full of (mostly able-bodied) people heard the problem quickly. They understood the stakes. They could see the future version of this category. And, they understood that disability will affect us all in some way, either directly or indirectly, and that we all deserve better support if we get there.

I never expected my career to bring me here, but I’m really excited to continue building this into the category-defining product I know it can be. We’re just getting started.