Aloha peeps,
Every two years, 40 to 60 people gather over a weekend in October at the Bremerhaven University to exchange ideas, pitch startups and work together in small groups. Each team has 54 hours to develop their idea and present it to a jury on Sunday evening within a 3-minute time frame. In today's lingo, this is called "pitching," but that's just a side note. Let's take a moment to reflect on the weekend.
A few weeks ago, Jonas Niedergesäß asked me if I would be interested in participating in the Startup Weekend, but I couldn’t think of a reason why I should do it. Our following discussion about the pros and cons of joining didn’t yield a clear outcome either. However, the mantra was, "You will learn something." So on October 19th (Thursday), as I was aligning my calendar with Facebook events, I noticed an invitation from a friend to the Startup Weekend and realized the date was fast approaching. My first thought was something like: "Damn, why this weekend? I wanted to do nothing for once!" I debated with myself but eventually bought a ticket—not because I was eager to "pitch" an idea, but because of my curiosity to learn something new. After all, I figured, "You’ll learn something."
The event kicked off around 6 PM on Friday. As usual, I arrived on my death trap of a bicycle, showing up a good 10 minutes before the program started. Oh, I should mention, the Startup Weekend was held at the Fährhaus (Makerspace by the Sea). Most people had already gathered upstairs, and I recognized many familiar faces. Once the program began, the weekend's moderator, Ümit Konuray, welcomed everyone and quickly moved on to the evening's main topic: pitching ideas. Yes, I’ve got the hang of this new jargon. Over 37 ideas were presented, and I pitched my idea of a universal translator, a.k.a.
Aren't we all "bags of mostly water"? Everyone who pitched an idea wrote it down on a poster. After all ideas had been presented, the voting began—each attendee was given four Post-It notes to vote with. My idea only received 6 Post-Its, placing me near the bottom. I didn’t mind, though, as I didn’t plan to pursue this idea anyway. The teams that received more than 6 votes now had the chance to recruit additional members. Since I wasn’t tied to any team, I became quite popular among the remaining 10 teams. I considered joining a team that wanted to create a map of all seeds used in agriculture. However, I struggled to see how this would generate any revenue. Another team wanted to reinvent the marketing strategy around the "Urinella." I must admit, the product itself already put me off, and they were only looking for a web developer. I wanted more.
Among the presenters was a man who had very confusingly pitched his idea and finished within a few seconds. However, he used the right buzzwords for me: API, REST, and Rails. I didn’t care that it had something to do with logistics. I found him talking with Stefan Kaschner just as he was about to leave. Interestingly, our initial team consisted entirely of developers. Well, one was a business informatics student, but hey, everyone tries in their own way. Later, we were lucky to be joined by Ann-Maria, whom I knew from volleyball practice, and Maria, one of the organizers of the Startup Weekend in Hamburg.
Honorable mentions:
- Lichtheilungspraxis (Honestly, WTF? Does someone really believe in this?)
- Swap Dimension (Two developers programming a Hearthstone-like chess game)
- The silent coffee machine (Sounds interesting, even for a non-coffee drinker like me)
- The "I'll deliver your sandwiches to your home" service
- The already-failed Soundcloud reboot
- Parkini a.k.a. renting out parking spaces that don’t belong to you
- The Co-working space/leather store combo
Other ideas that I forgot to mention weren't that noteworthy either.
The first evening went on until about 2 AM, during which we roughly outlined the concept. On Saturday, the coaches came around to visit each team. A coach is someone who has either founded a successful startup or manages multiple companies. Each coach could choose a team to visit and support. Our first visitor was Rainer June, who became increasingly excited about our idea the more we told him about it. In fact, our concept directly applied to his line of work. If the platform had already existed, we would have landed our first customer. Each additional coach helped us refine and improve the idea, so we ended Saturday night late again, wrapping up our work.
Sunday was all about preparing the PowerPoint for the presentation. That’s not really my strength, so I focused on coaching Patrick, the creator of the idea. Up until that point, Patrick wasn’t very comfortable speaking in front of people. After a few hours with me, he felt much more at ease. The day flew by, and soon we were sitting with all the other teams, listening to the presentations of our competitors. The judges always asked questions that made the teams sweat. We were also hit with a tough one: "How would you prevent an uncontrolled price-cutting spiral from emerging due to the market transparency created by your platform?" We couldn’t answer that question at the time, but we know the answer now.
The winners of the evening were:
- Local Hero: Co•pier
- Social Impact: Unused Talents
- Best Design: Silent Coffee
- Best Pitch: flax
- Overall Winner: CarrierLand
In the end, the question remains: "Was it worth it?" In my honest opinion, it was—primarily because it gave developers like me the opportunity to work on Greenfield projects. I enjoyed refining the idea, identifying problems, and defining their solutions. What I learned can be summed up easily: If you're creating a prototype for an app or website, use proto.io and AdobeXD instead of Balsamiq Mockups. I could have done more networking and drawn more potential customers' attention to our team, but I’m satisfied with my role as a developer. Now, I’m curious to see what the team will accomplish in the coming weeks and months.
The CarrierLand team, from left to right: Stefan, Ann-Maria, Moi, Maria, Patrick