My personal experience, thoughts and review of my lone Startup Weekend

Back in 2017 I participated in a Startup Weekend event in Auckland, New Zealand. It was something that I had wanted to do since I was really getting into business and entrepreneurship.

I had read the books, The Lean Startup (which many of the concepts are incorporated into this event) and Running Lean. I had also read other business books too, but one can only do so much studying, learning and acquiring knowledge before you want to act. Armed with this new knowledge, I felt ready to tackle this challenge and that it was the right next step for me.

I’m writing this from the position of what I remember about the weekend. I will take you through what the whole event looked and felt like for me!

The first day

You arrive Friday evening, check-in, get your badge and are meant to socialize until the Startup Weekend event officially kicks off.

There were drinks and food provided during the check-in period. However, if you happen to come towards the end of it, (e.g. you are coming to the event right after work), you will likely miss out on a lot of the goodies (like I did).

So it’s best to come early, or get off work a bit earlier, if you want the best chance of getting some food before the Startup Weekend begins.

After the check-in period, the official event will kick off with some speeches and a presentation. They explain what the schedule of events are for each day and give you some quick tips about presenting and general startup processes to help you throughout the weekend.

Immediately after, they ask all participants who want to pitch an idea to come down onto the stage. They do try to encourage everyone to do it.

These pitches happen one after the other and you’re given 60 seconds to pitch your startup idea.

Once all the pitches are finished, those who pitched an idea were given a blank sheet of poster paper and 3-5 minutes to write or draw on it. The objective was to try to “sell” their project idea as best as they could.

After the very short period of time, every idea pitcher is rushed into the communal room to hang up their posters. The main aim of the poster was to get other participants interested in teaming up with you on your idea.

All participants (including those who pitched ideas) got 3 sticky dots. These sticky dots were the way you casted votes for ideas that you wanted to work on.

Those people who didn’t pitch an idea were then let out of the auditorium and into the communal room to begin the team forming process.

Pitchers would yell out their idea to the crowd and try to attract other participants to their poster stand.

Participants would walk around and try to find an idea that interests them the most, and when they did, they’d add one of their sticky dots to the poster paper.

The whole process was a bit chaotic (especially if you were a pitcher).

As time went by, the posters that had no sticky dots on them slowly got taken down. Then those that only had 1, then 2, then 3 dots, and so on.

Event organizers keep repeating this process (pulling posters down) until there were only enough ideas left to split participants into groups of 5-8 people.

This whole team forming process goes by super fast and eventually everyone is on a team that (hopefully) they wanted to be part of.

Once all the teams were formed, every team went to a table to chat and begin working on their idea. In my group, everyone introduced themselves and their backgrounds first. Then the idea pitcher started talking more about their idea, their vision and the team discussed it more deeply.

Volunteers walked around and from time to time stopped by each table to see how each team was progressing. Sometimes they would give some mentoring, help out if someone had questions or if they needed support with something specific.

In my group we broke everything up into todo tasks and split the work based on what everyone was able to work on. Some of the tasks we had in our group were as follows:

• Do research about the idea online.
• Identify the problem and solution we were trying to solve in more detail
• Think about possible issues/problems with the idea.
• How can the idea be turned into a viable business that makes money?
• Competitor research
• Figuring out our unique value proposition
• Figuring out who the target market or audience was.
• Market research (talking to strangers/ your target audience)
• Making/conducting in-person or online surveys
• Coding
• Coming up with a name and logo

There were so many things that needed to be done and it was a bit overwhelming. You had to work through all tasks in an efficient manner!

Our group did a lot of talking and discussing. We got some tasks done, but this led to confusion and us potentially pivoting to a new idea. By the end of the evening, we didn’t make much progress at all. When we all went home at the end of the night, there weren’t many good feelings because of the problems we had with the project idea.

In our Startup Weekend event, everyone was allowed to stay and work as late as they wanted, or until the building closed. In our case, this was around 1am and we were able to come back the next day as early as 7am for breakfast.

The good thing at this event is that they do want you to sleep and not work 24/7!

The second day

Saturday morning starts off early with everyone feeling a bit drained, tired and the excitement from the previous day had worn off a bit.

There was no strict time to return, so everyone slowly started arriving back to the building and got some breakfast.

Unfortunately, a percentage of the participants will ghost and never return to the event again. Our team had lost almost half of our group. I believe this is a common issue that you need to watch out for (e.g. your team size being reduced as the event goes on). It’s not the best thing to have to deal with if you are a person who stays for the whole weekend.

It is definitely a big negative to the event because in our group it really killed the whole team morale when several people didn’t show up ever again. It was especially annoying when they didn’t mention anything the previous day and didn’t respond to any messages.

In my opinion, Saturday is the day where the bulk of the work gets done and you should be prepared for a very long day.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner were provided. There were 3-4 mini presentations throughout the day to break things up, or as I would like to say “distractions”, that you have to attend.

Around this point in time is when all teams go to collect some market feedback from potential customers. This is where they try to get some sort of validation on their idea. Figure out whether or not people would actually use it, and whether or not they would pay for it.

Usually by around late afternoon is when you should have your idea well thought out with some sort of validation.

If things don’t go well during the market research, you still have time to pivot the idea or completely switch to a new one. However, if you do, you are playing catch up and have to redo a lot of work. We were in such a position, but in the end we stuck with our original idea as it was too late to switch.

Usually by the evening is when the attention of what to work on switches to the presentation, and more visual things. Such as a landing page, coming up with a name, logo and doing some kind of prototyping to get an MVP. Also figuring out how exactly the prototype would work.

Many people and teams again stayed working late into the night, or until the building closed. Often times the teams who stayed the latest were the ones who were most behind or struggling (like our group). The teams who progressed well and had everything on track will tend to go home earlier.

The entire Saturday was a grind. Prepare yourself for a long and draining day.

I’d say by the end of the night teams are either quite happy when they go home with their overall progress, or feel defeated that their amazing startup idea isn’t actually so amazing after all.

The third and final day

It is Sunday and the final day of the event! Again, it starts off early in the morning with breakfast and people have even lower energy.

The grind of the event had started wearing on everyone with fatigue, but participants need to keep pushing because Sunday was also a big day.

It was the day of the final presentations and seeing what every team had accomplished.

The day starts off with more urgency in the air because of the presentation deadline. Teams were scrambling to finish as much as they could.

In our group, most of the focus was on making/finishing off the presentation slides, and creating a script for the presentation. Though some people still work on their prototype, or trying to figure out last bits of information.

Sunday also includes lunch, as well as a couple more informal mini-presentations. It’s a much shorter day as the final presentations started late afternoon.

Presentations were 5 minutes in length and there was a Q&A session at the end from judges and participants.

After all the presentations, a winner was declared and the event officially ends.

In case you are wondering, our team did not win anything!

By the time you get home, you are so exhausted from the weekend grind that you will likely hit the bed super early so you can catch up on your lack of sleep!

Does Startup Weekend actually work?

As in… can a viable startup be born from this event?

I would say mostly no, but rarely yes! Most of the time this is simply a fun, learning and socializing event, rather than somewhere that actual startups/businesses get created.

The reason why I say this is because there are just so many variables that need to be right. From having a good team vibe, overall team skills, having a good idea, problem and solution, being able to execute on the idea, and overall team interest level.

There are so many more other things that I could name, but I think you get the general idea.

The focus of Startup Weekend isn’t to create as many viable startups as possible from the event, but to change your mindset about what can be accomplished in a short period of time.

And they definitely achieve that outcome by the end of the event!

Is it worth going?

This really depends on the project idea you end up working on, how much you believe in that idea and what your team members are like.

I would say it is probably worth experiencing at least once.

My personal experience, thoughts and review of my lone Startup Weekend

Since I covered the details of the event quite well, I won’t go into the nitty gritty details again. I’ll just say what my overall thoughts were about the weekend and say what I liked and didn’t like.

Going to this event for the first time was a bit overwhelming for me and I definitely wasn’t as prepared as I could have been for it. If I knew more details about what happens at the event, it would have helped me be ready for certain aspects of it.

I also found that there was a large gap in knowledge between what participants knew in terms of building a startup. The guidance / education / structure was quite minimal, which does provide for a lot of freedom, but it also means that lots of people didn’t know what to do as well.

In terms of networking, I found it to be hard to build any meaningful connections from the event. Maybe this would have been different if I vibed better with my team members.

Things that I liked:

• You are around other like-minded people who have some kind of interest in entrepreneurship or in building a startup.
• There are some “experts” around to ask for help and guidance.
• There are some learning tibits given throughout the event.
• It made me realize what is important, and what isn’t, for an MVP.
• A nice facility, workspaces, and food and drinks were provided

Things that I didn’t like:

• I didn’t like the team that I was in. There was a lot of conflict, arguing and pointless discussions that didn’t move the project idea forward. And unfortunately, how you experience the event depends a lot on how well you get along with your team members and this comes down to luck. If you have a sh*tty team, you are stuck with them for the rest of the weekend.
• Almost half of our group ghosted us after Friday
• 52 hours over a weekend is pretty demanding and tiring. Especially if you are older and are working full-time.
• I think the structure could have been changed to more classroom + workshops, with the Startup Weekend at the end to increase your chances of making friends.
• If you find out that your idea sucks after doing market research on a late Saturday afternoon (which was the case for our group), you’re basically forced to continue working on a useless idea just to finish the event. I did not like this at all as it was a big waste. In the real world you wouldn’t do that, since you’re not restricted with such a limited amount of time.
• This goes back to my classroom comment, but I felt that the guidance was a bit weak.
• The entrance fee was fairly high for what was provided.
• Unless your friends also sign up, you go to the event not knowing anyone there. So if you’re an introvert, or shy, it’s tough to mingle and get to know other participants. There weren’t any ice breaking games, or proper getting to know each other type games before the event officially started.

Final thoughts

I remember leaving my Startup Weekend with more negative than positive feelings. I believe this was predominantly due to the team that I was in, since we were very disconnected and didn’t get along so well. Plus our idea was not good. After the event was over, I don’t think any of us ever talked again.

However, some friends of mine who also participated at the same Startup Weekend had a much nicer event experience. They actually became friends with the people on their team and they even went out for dinner (post event) a couple of times. This was because they all got along well and were happy working together as a team.

So what your experience is like really depends. It can either be a hit or a miss! Though if you are interested in going to a startup event like this… then you should definitely check out my post about the coolest startup and hackathon events in the world.

With my experience of this event in mind, I believe it is very important to know how to quickly assess whether an idea is good and how to pick a good team/idea. As this will be a massive advantage to you at the event and it will have a huge impact on your overall experience. If you can chat up as many people as possible, it will also help increase your odds of joining a team where you jive well with.

If after attending such an event and you happen to catch the entrepreneurial bug, or just have a desire to start your own business, then you could possibly continue down this path and join some of the best online business and entrepreneurship communities.

Other wise, if you just want to make the most of your Startup Weekend event, you need to keep the following in mind.

It really is all about the team and to a lesser amount the idea. As even if you have a sh*tty idea, but have a good and fun team to hang out with, at least you will have a great experience for the rest of the Startup Weekend event.

So choose your team wisely!