The places TuuTap takes us… From a small idea on a screen to the bright lights of New York Tech Week. And we didn’t get there alone – huge thanks to ICKK (Innovatin Center of the Košice Region), whose support turned “maybe one day” into packed bags, a New York itinerary, and our team right in the middle of it all in Manhattan.

Monday: The first session of an intense SOSA bootcamp, where we met the Czech startup cohort (long live the Czecho‑Slovak brotherhood). These guys had some serious ideas, and a few of them already had solid backing reaching into eight digits. After that came the first pitch session. I’d give myself 3 out of 10 – it was catastrophic, but the upside was obvious: huge room for improvement. A long day defined by jet lag and an unhealthy amount of coffee ended with a Happy Hour in a nearby bar, but it was far from over, because we still had serious work to do on our pitch.

Tuesday: The morning started at JP Morgan, in their impressive premises filled with world‑class art. We quickly learned that if we ever want to bank with them, we need to level up quite a bit. From there, we headed back to SOSA and straight into pitching. Progress! This time I’d give myself 4 out of 10. Basically, still not good – but that’s the life of any startup: lots of imperfection and plenty of mistakes. Your job is to learn instantly, improve relentlessly, and never look back. For us, that meant pivoting our entire pitching narrative to a new angle. We squeezed every drop out of the day and only closed our laptops at midnight.

Wednesday: Big day. The intense SOSA bootcamp culminated in its final session. An afternoon pitching block served as our last rehearsal before the evening. We got a big boost from our mentors Anna, Bianca and Ariel. We left SOSA for the Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York, walking into a very chilled atmosphere. It was so powerful that any anxiety about the upcoming Pitch Night simply vanished. Five Slovak startups presented to an audience and three jurors. TuuTap presented how VAS services keep losing revenue and we can fix that. This time I’m not going to rate my pitch; I’ll just say I was finally happy with it, and for the first time I felt truly at ease on stage. That’s what having a great product and a strong story does.

Thursday: A visit to Amazon in their Lord & Taylor building, which they bought for 978 million dollars in 2020. The interior matched the exterior – a visually tempting place to work. As a big fan of interior design, I loved it and couldn’t stop complimenting it.

Friday: Free day. We used it to walk around Manhattan: along the High Line, down to Little Italy, through Chinatown, to the Financial District, 5th Avenue and Central Park, fuelling ourselves with New York–style pizza and bagels. In the evening, we boarded an overnight flight to Vienna and then headed home – hoping that after last year’s San Francisco trip and this year’s New York adventure, visits to the USA will become a regular thing for the TuuTap founders. Fingers crossed.