Postgame: Startup Weekend SAC
This past weekend I participated in my first Startup Weekend here in Sacramento and now that I’ve had a couple days to decompress I wanted to provide some thoughts on the experience. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Startup Weekend it’s a weekend long competition ran by Techstar’s non-profit arm to foster entrepreneurship and basically everything else that makes this country so awesome. Startup Weekend is international and is hosted all the time, check it out!
Like most participants I came in with an idea to pitch. This is highly encouraged and is at the very least a great way to get some public speaking exposure. Fortunately out of the ~40 pitches my pitch/idea was 1 of 6 ultimately chosen to become a project in which all the participants would divide and conquer over. From here everything happened fairly organically - participants gravitated towards ideas they felt most inclined to thus forming teams.
Just like with any business the most important factor is the team. I was able to recruit 6 awesome individuals (pictured alongside me below) to what is now known as Go HalfWay. The first major takeaway: having a good team and distribution of talent is everything. We had 4 business development type people (including myself) and 3 developers (1 full stack, 1 front end, 1 back end) which I felt was a great split. A number of the other teams loaded up on either allll developers or business developers which clearly showed in their final product.
As the de facto leader I made a clear point that while it was my initial idea the team now owned it. Getting their buy in was imperative to the weekend’s success and they’d be dedicating the next 54 hours of their life to it. We spent Friday night outlining a SWOT analysis and piecing together our mission statement. Getting everything down on physical paper early was perhaps the 2nd best thing we could do as everyone was able to visually see our value proposition on the wall.
Heading into Saturday morning we had an assumption of who our early adopters would be but needed to validate this asap. This is where the team began to divide and conquer as the biz dev side created and distributed our Google survey during which the developers decided how to approach building our MVP. While the surveys raked in we debated our revenue model and our go to market strategy. Here’s another takeaway - you don’t need to have it all figured out right off the bat. We got a little bogged down pursuing the hypothetically best route when there were other items to tackle. 14 hard worked hours later things couldn’t help but feel like they were shaping up.
Sunday was a race to the finish as we were scheduled to pitch that evening. Both the MVP and go to market strategy were nearly complete and therefore the most time spent was fine tuning the final pitch and making iterations based on feedback from the weekend’s mentors. This leads me to my next piece of advice: be weary of feedback. Always be open to feedback or constructive criticism but at the end of the day go with your gut. Had we followed every mentor’s advice we would have changed our approach 6 times. With that being said we had 2-3 mentors who really helped us zero in.
Before we knew; it was time to pitch. The Go HalfWay team had the oh so highly coveted last pitch of the night slot providing for an either hero or zero moment. After another member and I told our story we ended up taking 2nd at the competition (but later was upgraded to 1st as the then 1st place idea was found to have plagiarized). It wasn’t quite the walk off grand slam I’d imagined, however; I was incredibly proud of what my team and I accomplished. The judges were very optimistic regarding the idea as well MVP demo, which I’m told was quite unique for the weekend.
For those interested in testing the entrepreneurial waters I highly suggest attending a Startup Weekend (and pitching!). It was an incredible experience and I met a number of amazing individuals from all over Northern California. The team and I are still busy at it working on our project soon to be business which I think is a testament to the weekend. In fact, I just got back tonight from pitching again! I’ll dedicate another post to the actual startup at a later date.
Other thoughts I wasn’t able to work into this post:
Don’t try to Alpha anyone. First, trying to be an Alpha really just means you’re a Beta. But one-upping teammates or failing to consider other options makes one look amateur and denies any advantage of having multiple minds problem solving.
Pick something realistic and research it beforehand. While solving world hunger is an excellent pursuit it’s too high in the clouds for the weekend’s sake. Pick something to build that’s achievable and relatable.