Turning an idea into a start-up company in one weekend. It seems like an impossible task. Yet, 23 teams did it during the recent Amsterdam Startup Weekend , which took place from 5-7 July in Pakhuis de Zwijger. All teams found an idea within 52 hours, validated it with customers, turned it into a minimal product and made a flashy 'pitch' presentation. Below are the best ideas that came out of this.
Mixed field of participants
Registration for a startup weekend is based on three roles:
Developers who can and want to program;
Designers who can create a slick website, for example;
Business people who bring entrepreneurial knowledge.
The idea is that all roles are represented in each team. In this way, you also learn from each other's skills and each team can also create a complete proposition. The participants for this weekend came from all over Europe: from Greece to Israel to Brazil. Several participants had travelled to the Netherlands especially to be able to participate in this weekend. Some participants had been working on their idea for a while and wanted to take it further.
Ingrid Schoots, CEO of beautybookers.nl , an already successful booking agency for beauty salons, participated for example with a new idea in the same sector. She realizes that such a weekend can be really valuable to test an idea as an entrepreneur.
Jury criteria
Each team will be judged at the end by a professional jury, consisting of startup professionals. For example, Herman Kienhuis , who invests in startups as director of Sanoma Ventures, Marijn Pijnenborg , board member at Iens , and Mike Lee , CEO of game company New Lemurs and also founder of app initiative Appsterdam. The jury will pay attention to three things in the assessment of the team:
Business model: to what extent is there a business model that allows one to recoup the investment?
Execution: Has the team also built a concrete product (often an app or website)?
These things are completely in line with the philosophy of Lean startup: anyone sweden mobile phone number list who wants to start a company must first talk to customers to determine what their needs are and then offer a minimal product as quickly as possible to see if customers are really willing to pay. Doing this in one weekend is a big task, but fortunately there are coaches walking around during the weekend to help the teams with this.
The best ideas
The best idea of the weekend is hard to choose: the ideas were too different. Below, in random order, the most interesting ideas.
321code
321codeThe idea of 321code was a programming environment for children to learn programming. A very sympathetic idea and beautiful execution, but perhaps a difficult market. The jury mainly wondered how old children should be: for most children this is probably too difficult. There have also been many initiatives that have not succeeded. Fortunately, the team showed in the demo that the design skills are fine: it looked attractive in any case.
Clear
clearClear had a very provocative pitch for a very problematic product: they want to make it possible to send sexy photos to each other for a fee, which will be deleted automatically after a short time. They saw the target group for this in the 'sexting' corner. It seems to be a product for the adult entertainment industry and as the audience already noted, it is 'too evil' for an investor to get their hands on. Technically a nice find, that's true. Perhaps a solution in search of a problem.