GoHalfWay - Startup Weekend SAC Pt.2
Back in November 2016 I wrote about my experience with Startup Weekend Sacramento. While my team and I tried to keep things moving after our 1st place finish things unfortunately ended in March. Turns out the whole entrepreneurship thing is pretty tough. I loved every second of my dip into the startup world and wanted to provide a sort of update of how things went as well a few thoughts.
The Pitch
Google Flights, Kayak, SkyScanner, and the like are all destination based airfare search engines. You set your criterium (where & when) and hit go. These sites are great for searching a majority of airfare. However, for those who are traveling just in order to be with someone(s) and are open to meeting in a potentially one off location - finding this airfare is painful. For example, if a group of 8 friends dispersed all throughout the USA wants to meet, how do they efficiently go about finding the best intersection point? There is a clear need for an origin based search engine. Enter goHalfway.
The Honeymoon Phase Ends
Coming out of the weekend we were all high off our recent success. However, upon beginning our team alignment meeting a few days later it was quickly apparent attrition would be our biggest problem. Life obligations left us with 3 people (including myself). While reloading was a priority we never successfully on-boarded new talent through GHW’s entirety.
The 3 of us set off trying to deploy the $15K in developer, graphic design, and incubation benefits. This was incredibly difficult because simply put, not being a paying customer means you’re not a priority. To our own fault we let this hamper our progress. I even initially relied on 3rd parties to create our landing page. Lesson 1: You’ve got to make it happen yourself. Don’t rely on outside consultants.
We never got our first dollar but I do believe our approach was correct. Having the ability to provide intersection points for an unlimited number of fliers it seemed our early adopters would be event planning professionals tasked with setting up conferences involving dozens of people (i.e. annual sales conference, gaming tournaments, Tableau user conferences). After all, in many cases intersecting airfare provides cost savings which is an obvious sell for these event co’s. Lesson 2: come up with a clever way to demonstrate your product or idea. I wish I would have put together a 1-pager/white paper or video showcasing the functionality and potential cost-savings we could provide.
With only 1 greenhorn developer the product stagnated. We encountered the Chicken or the Egg dilemma where we had no idea what to build and when. Do we wait for our “early adopters” to tell us the functionality or should we start heading in some sort of direction? I’ve already touched up on it but in the absence of talent you need to make it happen yourself (Lesson 1) - I should have taught myself to code so I could add another hand in development.
One thing I believe we did well was utilizing the community - whether it was free press (StartupSac), pitch events, or simply getting feedback, we gained a lot from those more experienced around us. I was even able to successfully reach out to a local UI Dev and get some free mockup work: check it out for yourself here.
The End
The final dagger in the heart was moving to Atlanta for my next with Siemens rotation in January. Without being in person it was difficult to lead and sustain motivation from the the east coast. Along the way Donte’s side project, HoopMaps (check it out!!!) began to take off! They even made it on Shark Tank! goHalfway continued without any progress until March when it finally dissolved.
Startups are complex. A lot of independent variables have to click in order for success to have a chance. goHalfway never became a business, it was rather a club. However, through that club I learned a ton about myself, leadership, and more of what it takes to be even marginally successful in the startup world.