I had the opportunity to attend a startup weekend here in my hometown of Bend, Oregon. In 54 hours, I watched 30 ideas, turn into 7 concepts that developed 7 companies including 7 websites, facebook pages and twitter feeds. Each team conducted interviews with potential customers and defined their first release backlog for their Minimal Viable Product (MVP), embracing the Lean Startup principles discussed by author Eric Ries. Each team also created business models to help them understand their potential revenue opportunities, cost of goods sold, SG&A and profit potentials. On Sunday night at 6pm, just 48 hours later, these new companies presented their five minute pitch deck to a group of judges. One company had secured it's first paying customer, and another company was invited into a local World Market to test their homemade Venezuelan chocolates in the store. These teams gained an amazing amount of traction over the weekend. In this blog post, I plan to share some of the lessons learned from the weekend and how they can be applied to your startup.
I had heard of Startup Weekends being held in other cities, but I didn't give it a lot of thought. Honestly, the idea of spending my entire weekend coaching teams didn't sound like a lot of fun. Boy was I wrong. Not only was it a ton of fun, it was insightful, rewarding and energizing. Let me explain...
What is Startup Weekend you ask?
Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities to turn a pitch into a startup. These are 54-hour events where developers, designers, marketers, product managers, business strategist and past Founders (acting as coaches), come together to share ideas, form teams, build products and launch startups.
Some people assume Startup Weekend is a tech driven event solely for software programmers, like a hack-a-thon, they're not. Startup Weekend draws a wider audience with broader skills: sales, marketing, business development managers, finance, UX/UI, web, CSS, data architects, past founders and current CEOs, CFOs, VCs and a handful of experienced Angel investors. Add these skills early on, when the MVP is being defined, changes the typical focus on "product development" to "customer development", asking some tough questions, early. Like, "Who is our customer, what is their persona, and how much would they pay to have this product or service?" Add in the 54 hour time box around the event, you also bake in a real sense of urgency to move quickly into customer discovery.
What happened at Startup Weekend – Bend, Oregon.
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