This past weekend I attended Startup Weekend London. Held at the IBM offices on London Southbank, around 60 people came out to build a business over the weekend. The weekend started off on Friday night and lasted until Sunday night. On Friday, everyone with an idea had the opportunity to pitch the room in hopes of finding a team to work on their idea. From all of the ideas pitched ,11 different teams were formed around the ideas shared. During the pitch session, I even got up the nerves to pitch an idea I had been pondering and found a great team!
From marketing people, to developers, to project mangers, Startup Weekend was full of the necessary resources to get any new idea off of the ground. I had been to a Startup Weekend in Seattle before, but wasn't able to stay the entire weekend. Coming to SW London, I knew I wanted to participate in the entire event.
The beginning:
My idea was to create a travel site that allowed travelers with an unknown destination to search for holidays by budget. For many people, (myself included) travel booking is a hassle and huge inconvenience. Sometimes I may not know yet exactly where I want to go, but do know how much I have to spend. Without an exact location or date in mind, it is often troublesome and frustrating to compare holiday deals around the world. The idea was tweaked over the weekend and resulted in Zolidays, created by Rob Mason, Nick Silversides, Sanjay, and me! Benjamin Black also helped us with some development on the project.
During the weekend, we sat all day in a room working on the idea, with breaks for meals. We shared the room with two other awesome teams. The other teams in our room were Rags 2 Riches, a mobile geolocation game that allowed users to own real estate, similar to Monopoly, but with a new and exciting spin. I am excited to see the game when it is fully developed and to see how it compares to Foursquare and Gowalla in terms of a location based app.
The other team in our room was Tweevents : http://www.tweevents.com - Have your friends ever tweeted about an event that you wanted to easily put onto your Google calander? I know many times I see tweets about events and gatherings, thinking I should write that down - only to forget about it completely 5 minutes later. With Tweevents, just hashtag any event with #tweevent to list it on the Tweevents site. Then simply enter your user-name on the site to see your friends events on an interface that lets you see how much time is remaining before the event.
Over the course of a weekend, I learned a lot about building a team, starting a business from square one, and how to deal with different sorts of problems. Even though I have started 3 businesses in the past, it was fun to do the entire process in a 72 hour period. Walking around over the weekend, I saw teams hard at work on their projects. Not only did I see hard work, but I did see some high tensions and auguring. I think my favorite line of the weekend would have to be "I don't need a developer to tell me how to do marketing!" - Ouch! Part of working in a start-up, is abandoning ones ego to some extent and being accommodating and flexible. While yes, it is good to have a plan, it is also important to solve problems as they come and not sit around planning for them before they happen.
Something that struck me as odd, was the amount of people who had come to the event, but didn't really want to work. If you are not passionate about building something cool and do not love entrepreneurship, then Startup Weekend really is not for you. During the opening remarks on the event, Franck Nouyrigat, one of the organizers, said "if you can't handle the weekend, you will not handle 5 years of being a startup" - which I think is completely true.
The end:
At the end of the weekend, everyone got to present their prototypes and there were prizes awarded. As time at the venue ran out, we unfortunately had to cut our presentation short and didn't get to receive any feedback from the judges. Even though we had a short time to present, Zoliday was positively accepted by the audience. The overall prize and the "Idea to Most Likely Get Funded" was awarded to Rags 2 Riches, yet I believe any of the ideas there have the potential to be very successful! The winners in the other categories were Brit my Pride in "Startup with the Best Crowd Appeal", Buddy Bounce in "Startup Most Likley to Make a Million Pounds" and Zoliday in the "People's Choice Award" - YAY!
While the event was great fun, the only piece of feedback I have for the event is to next time, please have better food! The food served was almost all carbs and fried food. Not only was it not very tasty, but was not the sort of food that gave you energy to keep working all weekend.
After the event :
Right now, our team is still in talks regarding whether or not to continue with Zolidays. Even if we do not choose to continue, I will walk away from the project with a lot more knowledge and insight about the tech and startup space. I would definitely recommend Startup Weekend to any looking to get involved in entrepreneurship or looking for just a fun project one weekend! Thank you to all of the fantastic organizers for making the event a success. They all had much insight to offer and were a blast to joke around with!
If anyone from this past weekend would like to connect with me now that the event is over, I am always up for grabbing coffee!
Friend me on Facebook or Linkedin. :)
Also, go follow Zolidays on Twitter : @Zolidays ;)
this is Arianna O'Dell's (old) blog. See http://www.ariannaodell.com