Last month, I attended an event in New York City called Startup Weekend NYC Blockchain Edition. Startup Weekend is a global organization to help bring together teams to create startups. They constantly hold events all over the world of different themes. The event I attended was blockchain themed.
Startup Weekend events are three-day events from Friday night until Sunday night. After checking in, Friday night begins dinner, which is immediately followed by the event coordinator kicking off the even. We were lucky to have Roger coordinating our event. Roger has attended many Startup Weekend events, and he has even hosted several.
After the introduction, program participants are then given 30 seconds each to get on stage and pitch a startup idea if they wish. The idea must be for a new startup and not something that has already been implemented.
After pitches are over, participants are given a chance to vote for their favorite ideas from the pitches. Based on the number of attendees, twelve ideas were chosen to be worked on during the weekend. Each group was required to have at least five team members and no more than seven. After joining teams, everyone went home around 10 PM and came back Saturday morning at 8:30.
Saturday kicked off with breakfast at 8:30, and then at nine, the event staff directed the participants to the sixth floor of the building where the event was hosted. This was where the teams would work on their startup ideas all weekend. The startup idea for the team I had joined was a way to keep money circulating in local communities rather than having the money be spent at big box stores.
We began working on our startup idea by narrowing down on what the exact problem we were trying to solve was. Then we had to figure out what we thought the best solution to this was. Saturday afternoon, we hit the streets to validate our startup. We had to determine if the problem we narrowed down on was a real problem, then we had to figure out if we had thought of the best solution. We spoke to a few small business owners, and we spoke to a few of their customers.
We hit the Union Square Farmers Market, but we quickly learned that they were not our target audience after speaking to a few of the stand operators. So we headed back to the event space and stopped by some brick and mortar small businesses in the area to see if they were more our target market. We were right. The brick and mortar small businesses seemed to face the problem we were attempting to tackle more than the farmers market stand operators.
While it may seem like it was a pretty straightforward process, we hit many problems along the way. First, within our team itself, we had several times when team members had opposing viewpoints on an issue, and it was not always easy to come to an agreement. Also, our startup idea pivoted many times from the time ideas were presented to final presentations Sunday Night.
During the day Saturday, the organizing team had coordinated to have several quite useful but optional workshops. These workshops were on various topics related to blockchain since the theme for that weekend was blockchain. The team had also coordinated to have mentors give feedback on our startups and help with problems on Saturday and Sunday.
On Sunday, pitch decks were due to be submitted ready for final pitches by 4 PM. Pitches began at 5 PM. The startup ideas that were pitched included healthcare, insurance, charity, the food industry, and more. Each group had ten minutes on stage. The ten minutes consisted of five minutes to pitch the startup idea, followed by five minutes for judges to answer questions.
Three winners were chosen. third place went to a group called Charity Coin which aimed to make sure more money sent to charities went to victims in need and less to the corporate side.
Second place was a group called Luxury Ledger which aimed to create a system to verify the authenticity of luxury goods so that one could tell if they were buying a legitimate product or a cheap knockoff. First place went to a group called BlockVac which aimed to make health records more easily accessible.
Overall, I would say I had a really great experience. I had a chance to network with many great new people, attend the workshops Saturday to learn more about blockchain, I had fun spending the weekend developing a startup idea with a great team, and it was great to get more practice getting on stage in front of people as well as getting useful pitch practice. I would definitely attend another Startup Weekend event if I had the chance.
I would like to give a shoutout to one of the groups there that I really liked. It was not one of the winners, but I still think they had an interesting idea. The group named Taxomatic was working on developing a system to be able to automate the tax filing process. Anyone who has gone through the headache of filing taxes before would like their idea.
