Nathan Freystaetter, founder of Go Fig, participated in Furman University’s GVL Starts, a 9-week long program hosted by the Hill Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The program consisted of mentorship from professionals across a broad range of expertise, pitch practice, and comradery from other startup founders. The program culminated in the highly anticipated GVL Starts Demo Day, a pitch competition in front of a crowd of over 200 people and 3 judges, including Shay Houser of Founderville VC.
Three startups received a $5,000 grant, one for Best Product or Service, Best Technology, and Crowd Favorite.
The judges announced Go Fig as the winner of the Best Technology startup and took home a big check worth $5,000!
What the 9 weeks actually looked like
GVL Starts runs like a structured accelerator compressed into a semester. Each week pairs founders with a mentor panel (operators, investors, functional experts) and pushes the cohort toward a crisper problem statement, customer interview cadence, and investor-ready narrative. The mentorship is the part that matters most: there is no substitute for sitting across from someone who has already solved the problem you’re staring at, whether that’s GTM, pricing, or early hiring.
For Go Fig, the big unlock was sharpening the positioning from “a tool that helps with data” to the specific wedge we actually serve: finance leaders at mid-market companies who are buried in data-gathering and starved for strategic time. Clarity on that problem changed everything downstream.
Why the $5,000 mattered more than the dollar amount
$5,000 is not a round of funding. It does not pay a salary or fund a hire. What it does is remove friction, another few months of tooling, customer-research conversations, or travel to early customers, all of which compound in the pre-revenue phase. The validation of Best Technology at a pitch competition with real judges also mattered: an investor taking the time to evaluate a startup and coming out supportive carries weight when you are two people and a conviction.
What came next
Since GVL Starts, Go Fig has been accepted into SCRA’s Member Company program, received additional grant funding, and shifted the product toward the Financial Intelligence Graph model, a governed, connected model of every system, entity, and relationship in a company’s finances, with AI financial analysts running on top.
Thanks to the Hill Institute, the GVL Starts mentors, Shay Houser and the other judges, and the Greenville community for the start.
