Stacy Quackenbush and Hive3 Win the People’s Choice at Canopy’s July Global Demo Night

What happens when founders join a startup Demo Night from New Jersey, Lisbon, Palestine, Portugal and the UK, with an expert joining from San Francisco?

You get a pretty good demonstration of what a global founder community can look like.

Canopy’s July Remote & Global Demo Night brought together five founders building very different businesses. They had five minutes to demo, five minutes to answer questions and one shared objective: learn by doing.

At the end of the evening, Stacy Quackenbush, Co-Founder and CEO of Hive3, was named the July People’s Choice winner.

Five founders. Five very different problems.

The July Demo Night featured:

• Stacy Quackenbush — Hive3 — an education and community platform designed to give educators greater ownership of their audiences, revenue and relationships.

• Elodie Pagaud — Inkspot — a tattoo matching and booking platform connecting customers with artists and ready-to-tattoo designs.

• Nina Chande — Like No Other — helping organisations and vendors understand procurement, negotiation and the changing commercial models emerging around AI.

• Ken Moore — Visi Properties — using location-powered property insights to turn traditional estate agency boards into active lead-generation tools.

• Ameen Abo Diak — a virtual science lab platform enabling students to conduct science experiments through accessible digital simulations.

Mufeng Xie, a software engineer joining from San Francisco, provided the expert lens for the evening, questioning each founder and ultimately making the People’s Choice selection. The participating founders also questioned and challenged each other throughout the evening.

That diversity matters.

One founder was thinking about tattoos. Another property. Another procurement. Another science education. Another was rethinking how educators build sustainable businesses and communities.

Yet many of the startup questions were remarkably similar.

Who is the customer? What problem are you really solving? How does the business make money? Why will customers choose you? How does the product scale?

Those are useful questions whether you are testing your first MVP, looking for customer validation or preparing for investment.

Why Stacy and Hive3 stood out

Stacy opened her pitch with a problem she and her co-founder had experienced personally: education platforms that can take significant percentages of educator revenue while controlling the relationship between educators and learners.

Hive3 is their response.

The platform gives educators tools to build learning communities, deliver courses, integrate existing applications and communicate directly with students.

But Stacy’s ambition goes further.

Hive3 incorporates AI teaching assistants, real-time analytics and blockchain-based credentials that can be verified and connected with future employment opportunities.

The early validation caught attention too.

Stacy explained that Hive3 had gone live around six weeks earlier and had already signed 17 companies and communities representing more than two million members. The product had been tested across 75 countries with more than 100 activations.

But numbers alone didn’t win the room.

It was the narrative.

Stacy connected the commercial opportunity with something deeply human: giving educators more control and giving learners greater access to opportunity.

Her own experience studying computer science, being one of very few women in her engineering school and later becoming a mother to neurodivergent children has shaped how she thinks about access to education and opportunity.

That combination of founder-market fit, early customer validation, commercial thinking and purpose made Hive3 memorable.

When Mufeng was asked to select his favourite demo, he chose Hive3 for both its existing business metrics and its potential to create positive impact.

Stacy’s response captured something else important about startup life.

She immediately credited the six-person Hive3 team working across three continents.

Founders may deliver the pitch. Companies are built by teams.

Demo Night isn’t really about winning

The People’s Choice Award is important.

Stacy and Hive3 receive 12 months of Canopy virtual incubation, an incubation plan and additional support from the Canopy Community.

But Demo Night is deliberately designed to create something bigger than a competition.

It is a place for founder validation.

Founders learn by pitching. They learn by answering unexpected questions. They learn by watching another founder explain an entirely different business.

And sometimes the most useful insight comes from the question you hadn’t prepared for.

Elodie was challenged on matching algorithms, monetisation, artist reviews and safety.

Nina was pushed to make her customer proposition clearer.

Ken explored the practical challenges of integrating his technology into existing estate agency infrastructure.

Ameen faced questions about the accuracy of virtual scientific experiments and accessibility across different devices.

Stacy was challenged on differentiation, onboarding, customer acquisition, CAC, lifetime value and business model.

That is progression in action.

For a first-time Founder, a Demo Night is therefore about much more than perfecting a pitch. It is an opportunity to test the narrative around your startup, hear how other people interpret your proposition and identify the questions you still need to answer.

A global founder community without the geography

Perhaps the best part of July’s Demo Night was simply seeing where everyone joined from.

New Jersey. Henley-on-Thames. Lisbon. Portugal. Palestine. San Francisco. Devon.

Different markets. Different experiences. Different stages of the Founder journey.

One room.

For first-time Founders especially, building a startup can sometimes feel unnecessarily solitary. Peer support changes that.

You don’t have to know everything before you put your idea in front of other people. In fact, waiting until everything feels perfect can remove much of the value of the experience.

Bring the MVP.

Bring the early customer validation.

Bring the questions you haven’t answered yet.

Demo it.

Listen.

Learn.

Then go away and make it better.

That is what Canopy Demo Night is designed to enable: activation and progression within a global startup Founder community.

Congratulations to Stacy Quackenbush and the whole Hive3 team on becoming our July People’s Choice winner.

And thank you to Elodie, Nina, Ken, Ameen and Mufeng for creating an evening where five very different startups could come together, challenge one another and help everyone learn.

Want to join a future Canopy Demo Night?

Canopy runs Demo Nights throughout the year, giving early-stage and first-time Founders opportunities to demo their startups, meet other Founders, test their customer and investment narrative and get feedback from the community.

See upcoming Canopy Demo Nights and sign up at:

lu.ma/canopy