Brought to you by Inside Self-Storage. June, 2026 on Maui.
Come for our new technology/business breakthrough pitches
The winner was Proprise!
Proprise was the winner! See the story with this link.
The contest was for people working on solutions for the commercial property field in general or the self-storage field in particular... and for Green, Clean, and Sustainable solutions. (Proptech, CRETech, GreenTech)
The finalists have been selected for the Self Storage Hawai’i unConference New Technology and Business Breakthrough Pitch Contest.
Applications for the pitch contest closed on May 5th, 2024. The advisor and mentor group considered the contest parameters and helped select the following companies as the finalists:
Cactus, E-States, Hover City, Proprise.
Cactus. http://www.trycactus.com. Cactus makes it easy to visually understand an investment's performance, and encourages easier reporting & communication with your investors. Cactus helps to track performance & identify hazards from your laptop. It minimizes analyst inefficiencies by automatically delivering your reports in real-time.
Building.inc. (Formerly E-States). https://www.building.inc. Building.inc helps real estate developers raise capital from their community, using smart contracts to fix the fragmentation that commercial real estate developers face across constructing, financing, operating properties, predicting maintenance, and measuring environmental impact. Building.inc accomplishes this thorugh tokenization, blockchain & AI tools for institutions through a partnership with Inveniam.
Hover City. http://www.hover-city.com . Hover City designs and manufactures lightweight, high-end tiny houses that can be delivered via air to extreme locations. Its off-grid, modular houses can be rapidly deployed without relying on conventional infrastructure and conveyance, thus providing reliable and scalable housing solutions in remote and challenging environments.
PropRise Beacon. https://www.proprise.io/self-storage . Beacon by PropRise is an AI-powered analytics platform that revolutionizes self-storage decision-making by providing users with comprehensive, nationwide data on key self-storage metrics, demographics, interactive heat maps, zoning information, and more, all delivered through an intuitive, user-friendly interface.
The finalists are all invited to spend the week of October 21-25 at the Self Storage Hawai’i unConference networking with attendees.
The finalists will make a final pitch to attendees and then be ranked 1st through 4th place. This is a tremendous opportunity for customer discovery and connection building that will help these new companies understand how to better support the self-storage industry in particular and the general commercial real estate industry with their innovations.
For the people who pitch
A few simple rules for the PropTech pitch contest / GreenTech pitch contest. :
We'll look over your submission application. If you meet the qualifications below, we'll share your application across our networks bringing you tremendous exposure and opening up all sorts of opportunities.
Our advisers and mentors will help us narrow the field of PropTech startup & GreenTech startup applications to the most promising and interesting concepts and companies. Those most promising submissions will become semi finalists. As a semi finalist you'll receive two sessions of coaching and advisement from one or two of the amazing people in our advisor and mentor group. One of those sessions will be with Tron Jordheim.
The semi finalists will have a chance to to revise and update their pitches before their pitches are put out to the entire community of commercial property and self-storage people.
To qualify for the pitch contest:
1. Your product or service must somehow apply to commercial real estate in general or to the sustainability & decarbonization movement. Specific self-storage ideas are great, too.
2. You must already have at least a few customers and you must be generating revenue from paying customers.Your customers need to be more than free trials or Beta testers. You must have a product or service that has been validated. It cannot just be an idea or MVP. You've got to be further along than that.
Your solution could be purpose-built for commercial property or self-storage owners and operators or it could be in use in another vertical. Maybe you want to use this pitch opportunity to open up a new vertical? Maybe the customer discovery work you've already done in self-storage or commercial real estate has led you to a great new solution. Maybe your decarbonization or sustainability breakthrough hasn't gotten to our audience yet. In any case, your pitch is valuable to us.
Your country of origin or your home time zone doesn't matter to us.
Three finalists will be chosen to pitch to us in person and spend several days with us at the Self Storage Hawai'i unConference.
If you are chosen as one of the three finalists:
1. You agree to coaching/advisement before the event to ensure your pitches are well prepared and that your answers to questions are well thought out. You'll receive six sessions of coaching and advisement before the live pitch. Two of those sessions will be with Tron Jordheim. Four will be with others in our advisor/mentor group. This is priceless!
2. You'll pay your own expenses to attend the unconference and you must stay at the host hotel. (We'll comp you for the event registration.)
3. You'll need to attend the opening reception and all three group breakfasts. That means you will commit to at least three nights at the host hotel. This networking and connection building aspect of the pitch contest will be of tremendous value for you.
The relationships you'll build, the insight you'll gain, and the potential business breakthroughs you'll make will pay for the cost of being there many, many times over.
You'll pitch on Thursday morning. You'll return Friday morning for another round of questions and for the selection of the winners.
Winners will receive fame and fortune. Okay, they'll be self-storage famous at least. Being one of the three finalists will be a serious boost to your dreams.
Even if you do not get to be a finalist, just being an applicant will open all sorts of doors for you.
That's it.
Interested in being an advisor or mentor for the people pitching? Or maybe you'd invest in a promising new startup?
We put together a group of advisors and mentors to help us review and select candidates. We are looking for people who are interested in sponsoring a potential prize pool or potentially investing in one of the winners.
Your duties and time commitment are minimal as an advisor to the Self Storage Hawai'i unConference Pitch Contest. Here is a list of things we'll ask of you:
1. Share some pointers or advice on how we structure the pitch contest.
2. Take a quick look at the submissions of people hoping to pitch to us and help us decide who we should accept for the first selection round.
3. Think about who you know who has a startup that should be in the pitch contest and encourage them to apply.
Your duties and commitment as a mentor are up to you. Here is what we are thinking:
1. Give feedback on the pitches from the three finalists and help them make sure their pitches are excellent. Help them plan how to make the best use of the time they spend with us in Hawai'i.
2. Point them in the right direction if they need resources or if you see a good match with potential clients.
Your duties and commitment as an investor will be up to you as well. You may find opportunities to fund one or more of these startups and add them to your portfolio. You may want to become more involved in one or two of them and become one of their foundational investors and partners.
Your commitment as a prize pool sponsor would be to pledge an amount that will go towards the cash prizes awarded to the winners. Along with that comes the exposure and prestige of sponsorship and all the opportunities that will open up to you as a result.
Email Tron Jordheim if you would like to be an advisor, mentor, investor, or prize pool sponsor, or all four. Use this link to email him if you are interested.
Gather with VIPs from a 39 Billion Dollar industry! What a fabulous group to get to know for your customer discovery. What a fabulous group to see your pitch deck.
When you enter our pitch contest, you get exposure to a large group of potential clients, partners, and investors. You'll open up opportunities to do valuable customer discovery with people who ordinarily would not look at your email or take your phone call. You'll get your info and your value proposition in front of a group of serious people from the worlds of commercial property, venture capital, self-storage and more.