The Startup Weekend Hamburg 2011

Startup Weekend Hamburg

On my previous post, I was writing about taking initiative. That was one of the reasons I decided to participate in Startup Weekend in Hamburg (you gotta practice what you preach). Like the name suggests, it’s an event for starting up a new company or business idea over the weekend. So we had 54 hours (started on Friday at 6 pm) to complete whatever we were working on. As a motivator, by the end of the event, there were some awards for the best 3 ideas. But the real reward was, we get to know some great people in the business: developers, designers, business people, and investors. There were also mentors as well, who have been there and done that.

Friday 6pm

Lasse of cast.li acted as a moderator for the whole event. What a great motivational and funny speaker he was! Stephan, the Qype and 9flats founder, opened the event by giving the first speech. He mentioned about how to make a pitch in front of investors, and aspects we should consider. There are:

• What do we sell (product)
• To whom we sell (market)
• How we sell (process)

It makes sense.  But surprisingly not everybody has really thought about these when they are making a pitch.

let's do some pitching

The participants were encouraged to pitch ideas in front of the audience for 60 seconds each. There were 46 ideas from about 110 people who were attending. I decided to go to the front, took the mike and pitched an idea I just thought hours before the event.

After we were all done pitching, we got to choose three ideas we liked best. The ideas that received more than 10 votes would be worked on the whole weekend. It didn’t mean that the other ideas were dead, it would just make sense to work on something popular. My idea about online appointment systems received only 4 votes. But I thought it was not too bad. At least there were 4 other people who found my idea good. If you read this, please contact me :-)

my idea received..ehm... 4 votes! woohoo!

I decided to join the mobile payment  application project brought by our Belgian friends, Julien and Gonçalo (well, Julien actually comes from France and Gonçalo from Portugal, but they live in Belgium).  It turned out, we had the biggest number of team members.

After the team was formed, we worked on the concept to turn this into a practical business the whole evening until early Saturday. It was not as easy as I thought. But we took up the challenge. For most of us, the day ended at 2:30am on Saturday.

Saturday 8am

The business concept was not finished yet at this time. For me it was quite difficult to collect ideas from 10 different people with 10 different backgrounds. We haven’t even agreed on the name of our application. As a person with technical background, I learned a lot from my business-oriented team members.  How they worked on gathering business information such as potential competitors, market, and numbers and put them all together really amazed me. It was Saturday afternoon, and we were still working on the concept and quite frustrated because it seemed we didn’t make any progress. So I felt.

Speakers of the day were David from Soundcloud and Matti from YouIsNow (by the way,thanks Matti for the free ticket!), one of the sponsors. David was giving us advice on how to build a great team from scratch. The best advice he gave us, in my opinion, is we can’t too worry about competition. We should concentrate on creating a great product. If the product is great, people will use it. Matti told us a bit about YouIsNow and how we could earn the 500,000 euro startup package.

Saturday evening, after talking to a few mentors that were available to us the whole afternoon, we started to get the idea of how our business concept should look like. Introducing: Payzarr. Only then I started to create the website, with a help from our terrific designer, Luis. We were getting excited again. How time flies when we work with such an excitement. At this point, each of us knew our roles and what we should be doing.

Listening to Michael Backes, one of the mentors

Payzarr was supported by Apple and Beck's :-)

Sunday 8am

It was an almost empty auditorium. I saw only two programmers from the Cupcakes Lingerie team working (no wonder they did great!). Breakfast was not even ready yet. I decided to use the time to continue on the website design Luis had uploaded on our Dropbox. I don’t have Photoshop on my laptop, so a fellow startup Alex from kahua.us, who came shortly after me, helped me a bit.

Payzarr corner early Sunday morning. zzzzz....

Then one by one came Payzarr team members. We went straight to work. Some worked on our video presentation, the other worked on the power point presentation and collecting data. It was really a team effort. I can’t tell much about today, because I worked on the website the whole day.

Psychically, I was very tired at this moment. But the excitement beat the exhaustion.

All of a sudden, it was 5:30pm and we had to deliver our final product and present it to the judges, mostly from Venture Capital firms.

The finished products, beside our team product, ranged from online dating coach, book sharing to gamble for charity.

But we had the coolest video presentation! See it for yourself.

Despite this great video, Payzarr team didn’t win. But in the end, it was not about win or lose. We came there. We spent 54 hours working together on our projects and our dreams, networking and connecting with rock stars. That’s right, entrepreneurs are the new rock stars.

I’d like to personally thank Payzarr team members: Gonçalo, Julien, Miriam, Lucie, Jérémy, Irina, Philipp, Slava, Luis, and Camilla for giving me such a great experience. You guys rock!

And of course also big thanks to the event organizers and sponsors for giving us the opportunity to meet other like-minded people, mentors, and potential investors.

Like a certain Steve of Apple said in that famous Stanford speech:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

I would also add, stay connecting.