11 pitch rehearsals in 9 days, playing Mandopop on loop to fix my pronunciation. That was my Shark Tank Taiwan strategy.
After AppWorks demo day last December, a founder in the audience slid me the application link.
I'd just pitched to 500 people in Mandarin, was still running on adrenaline, and apparently hadn't regained common sense.
So I applied... then promptly forgot about it for 6 months.
Until a Taiwanese number called a few weeks ago and invited me down for live auditions.
My immediate instinct was to say no. I showed up with a backpack anyway.
Pitching Maibel meant defending business logic in Mandarin, under glaring studio lights with cameras capturing every possible founder malfunction.
Extreme founder sports.
I'd mistaken AppWorks demo day for pitch readiness. (It wasn't.)
Demo day taught me how to be precise for investors in 90 seconds. Shark Tank was asking for rhythm, tension, and a pitch that could hold investors, a live room, and a cold audience all at once.
My first version sounded like a business deck being read aloud: sterile, logical, dead on arrival for television.
My problem was diction, syntax, pacing, and how the words landed.
So I made Mandopop the soundtrack of my life for 2 weeks.
I grew up in a Mandarin-speaking home (which makes my English Literature degree funnier in hindsight). But Mandarin spoken at home and pitch Mandarin aren't the same.
Singaporean Mandarin gets to the point. Taiwanese Mandarin makes the point arrive with more lift, warmth and resonance.
Memorisation alone doesn't get you there.
I started rehearsing everywhere: on the road, in airport corners, on the flight to Taipei, until I stopped translating the pitch in my head and started fully embodying it.
My first rehearsal was the wake-up call. I spent most of my pitch proving the business case: market, product, model, traction.
Important, but those alone weren't what made Maibel undeniable.
The real moat was 15 years inside the problem: first as the woman rebuilding my own relationship with health, then as the coach watching hundreds of women struggle with the same gap between knowing and doing.
No one in that room understood that pain more intimately than I did. Yet somehow, I'd edited myself out of the pitch.
AppWorks helped me put myself back in without turning the pitch into fluff. Too much substance and it becomes a lecture. Too much entertainment and the business disappears.
By audition day, I was on my 12th revision. I felt so relieved I left without asking when the results would be out.
But Taiwan had already given me what I needed.
It stress-tested whether Maibel could survive outside the local context it was born in.
Crossing a language barrier is the easy part.
A wellness companion that only understands one market’s emotional cues isn't scalable.
If Maibel wants to serve women across Asia, we have to recognise the same pain under a different cover.
The harder work is cultural fluency. That's the real prep.
Hi, I’m Mabel.
I’m the founder of Maibel. I write about emotional AI, women’s wellness and learning to build the things I wish existed.
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