This weekend I participated in the Wellington startup weekend. I came into this event, excited to create a new never-seen-before product, and ended up learning that this was not a good way to approach startups especially when the MVP is to be created in less than 2 days.

What is Startup Weekend?#

Similar to a hackathon, startup weekend is a competition where you try to build a product in a given amount of time, to be presented to judges. The winner is the group with the best project.

The main difference is that, the idea is valued over the product itself.

For example, if your solution is an app which gives financial advice to students, the judges want to know, what exactly the product is, how it could be build, the costs, revenue, who the potential customers are, and how you will get them to pay.

You might create a slideshow which contains relevant data, with a short video of what the product might look like (you can cheat a website by using e.g. figma).

The Experience#

Day 1#

Pitching#

The event starts with us pitching ideas to later be voted. 60+ ideas were pitched, 2 of them being mine. The ideas I pitched were “Wearable Journal”, and “One Click Chocolate”

Due to the nature of Journals, they are always written at the end of your day after everything happens. But what if you are busy, what if you forget, what if you do something after writing your journal. But can’t you just write it throughout the day? Yes but that requires you to carry your journal around with you, and it is harder to structure what you have written.

That’s where the “Wearable Journal” comes in. It is a peice of hardware you can wear, which monitors your day and writes up a journal for you at the end of the day.

My other idea “One Click Chocolate” was nothing interesting. I just came up with something random because the organizers were asking for more people to present their ideas.

The product for this would have been a monitor in a fridge which monitors your diet, and order’s the best chocolate for your conditions based off of this.

Voting#

After the pitches, we were given 3 stickers each to vote for our favorite ideas.

I put mine on LooFinder(a toilet finding app), the Teenager Job Finding app presented by a 14 year old, and Joi.AI(a tool to help parents with babies sort through their photos).

Not much else to talk about with this stage.

Forming Groups#

After the most popular pitches were selected, we formed groups, and I joined Joi.AI.

We then went to a room and introduced each other. It was nice to sit down and expand on the idea that Shang(the person who came up with the idea) had created with five other teammates. Our discussion was centered around the problems that people in our market was, and defining who these people were. The main issue was organising through dozens of photos of children everyday, and being able to store the photos.