After Jake Kerber took third place with his first competitive presentation of Locusic and finished runner-up in his second try at pitching the startup competitively, Kerber and Locusic climbed to the top of the podium Thursday at Pitch & Grow 5 at the Des Moines Social Club. 

Locusic, a free music application that streams songs from bands based within 50 miles of the listener's location, won the fifth rendition of the Technology Association of Iowa's daylong pitch competition. Locusic edged out three other companies in the event's final pitch session: eDossea (Des Moines), a cloud file sharing service for dental medical records; Appcore (Des Moines), which provides global cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service for business, telecom and software vendors; and ASAP Technology Works (Iowa City), a social media consultancy. Those four advanced to the finals by winning separate pitch sessions earlier in the day. In all, 16 entrepreneurs pitched at the event. 

For Kerber, winning Thursday's competition was certainly rewarding, but the insight he gained through the experience would have been valuable regardless of Locusic's showing in the pitch session.

"The amount of feedback and the quality that companies were getting was just great," Kerber (left, photo from twitter.com) said in a phone interview this morning. "It was great to see so many professionals of the caliber of the judges that were there donating their time like that. That was great to see."

By winning Thursday's competition, Locusic is automatically entered into Pitch & Grow 6 on Oct. 26 at the Iowa Innovation Expo in Coralville.

Beyond preparing for another pitch competition, Kerber is also getting ready to roll out an update to Locusic, which is currently in private beta and has about 180 users. He said Locusic plans to invite all musicians in the Des Moines area to create accounts and begin uploading songs in preparation for Locusic's public beta launch. That public launch is scheduled to take place sometime before Locusic's launch party on Oct. 22. 

As Kerber forges ahead with that work on his startup, he does so with added momentum, courtesy of his Pitch & Grow experience.

"A lot of the feedback that I was receiving from some of (the judges) and from the audience was just, you know, that they liked the idea and that they were really excited for it," Kerber said. "So that's always good, to hear some validation like that."