How we landed our first three sponsors
Our first sponsor said yes because we made it embarrassingly easy to say yes. No fifty-slide deck. One page: who we are, what we ship, and exactly what their logo buys.
Nobody funds a vibe
Companies don't sponsor potential — they sponsor evidence. So before we asked anyone for anything, we made sure we had something to point at: a real project, a real event, real students with real GitHub profiles. The pitch wrote itself once the work existed.
A cold email is just a warm intro you haven't earned yet.
The follow-up is the whole job
Two of our three sponsors didn't reply to the first email. They replied to the third. Not because we nagged, but because each message added something new — a demo link, a photo from the Datathon, a short note on what we'd shipped that week. Persistence without new value is spam; persistence with it is a relationship.
That's the entire playbook. Do the work, make it easy to say yes, and follow up like you mean it.
Selin Arslan
Selin keeps the club funded and connected. She writes the proposals, runs the numbers, and builds the relationships that turn into internships and first jobs for members.