Simon says: Five things I learned at Startup Weekend Hamilton
I first started a company in 2004, and over the years, memory has softened those early days of chaos and struggled into a hazy glow. This weekend brought back some key lessons into sharp relief — lessons that I should have remembered better, because they still apply to what I’m doing today.
1. Passion matters
My group had some serious passion going on. Passion is the beating heart of a startup, without it you might as well go home. Investors can detect it and it’s one of the essential tick-boxes on their clipboards. Co-founders feed off it. Potential customers are seduced by it. Passionate people, like Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, can at times be difficult, but that’s just a side-effect of their driving desire to succeed. You need that driving passion to get through the chasm between initial idea and successful execution.
2. Pivot fast
One of the groups started out with an idea that was technically infeasible, but instead of giving up and going home, they proved their worth as a team by pivoting. Instead of trying to determine the calories in a meal through image recognition, they quickly switched to using iphone’s new voice recognition. The former would have required a team of PhD’s and a budget of millions, the latter could be demonstrated in a weekend.
3. Process matters
When my group first met in our own room, I listened as they talked from topic to topic in a jumble of asides and randomness. I waited for a while and then suggested we set up an agenda — figure out what we needed to do by the end of the day on Sunday. This simple process allowed us to step back and set up a series of stages, like brainstorming, market research, design, development, writing the presentation.
We also used the flipchart heavily. As we filled each sheet with notes, we taped it up on the wall. Pretty soon we were literally surrounded on all sides by ideas, which helped us keep track of what we’d done and were going to do.
4. Know your customer
Four of my group went out to farmer’s markets on saturday to talk to our target market, farmers and shoppers. This provided valuable insight into what they wanted and needed, and their interest gave us our first validation that the concept was sound. That really boosted the group.
I stayed behind but phoned a local organic farmer, a family friend, and interviewed her for about half an hour. What we learned helped us focus on extreme ease-of-use for non-technical farmers, and on specialized buyers who are chasing after a particular kind of apple, a rare imported herb, etc.
If the company continues, it will need to spend an enormous amount of time living with farmers and buyers in order to understand exactly what they will pay for. You can’t sit in a room and guess — you have to go out and ask and listen.
5. Hamilton has a lot of work to do
After the pitches, all of my preferred ideas were eliminated in voting. I was shocked! In my opinion, the voting showed that the participants — at the beginning at least — had poor judgement for the practicality of building a product in a weekend. And, they lacked and understanding of what a viable business opportunity looked like.
Why did that happen? I put it down to the immaturity of the tech startup community in Hamilton. Only a tiny proportion of the participants had ever started up before. It’s a knowledge vacuum that we are filling with events like this one, innovation factory’s programs, DemoCampHamilton, and others.