5 tips for a Startup Weekend

Last weekend I attended Startup Weekend Manchester where I was a member of the winning team with GoAnnotate; a tool for writers to receive feedback on their work. With Startup Weekend coming to the Scottish community this weekend, with Startup Weekend Edinburgh, I figured it was worth sharing my views on why we won. So here are my 5 tips for a Startup Weekend:

Teaming up

At Startup Weekend you have 54 hours to turn an idea into a viable business. 54 hours during which you’ll need to sleep, eat and socialise (Startup Weekends are fantastic for networking) so you may be fooled into thinking many hands make light work. Wrong.

In my opinion a large number of people working on the same idea leads to either a disgruntled team working under a dictatorship or a process of decision making by committee. Neither work.

In our case we initially only had two members. The decision that took us the longest to settle on was probably what font to use. We each deferred when something fell outwith our area of expertise and let each other work on what we were good at.

Just start small

At Startup Weekend you should really be testing out your base assumption. Sure you’re idea may scale to encompass several revenue streams and verticals but over the weekend focus on a market, a customer and a base product.

Being distracted by other potential happenings for the business will get you nowhere. Definitely identify them, make it clear there is potential but at the weekend don’t get hung up on them.

A great read on this topic is this recent blog post by Joel Gascoigne of Buffer, Start something small.

Build and validate effectively

I would ward off doing a vague, airy fairy survey monkey. This is not quality validation. A competing team boasted how they had been on the street and received feedback from a whole 40 people. Sorry but they 40 people on their Saturday shop likely didn’t give a toss about your instagram for cats with daily deals. The responses are next to worthless.

With GoAnnotate we had a rough V1 up on Saturday night. Over night we had over 200 users, by the time we pitched on Sunday night with was over 350. These users were giving us qualitative feedback and of course quantitative feedback (huge thanks to GoSquared). It showed us the idea had some legs and we should iterate and now try to test the assumption people would pay for the service by turning our users into customers.

We were only a couple of hours shy of incorporating payments (thanks to GoCardless). To my understanding no other team was close to taking payments during Startup Weekend Manchester.

Hone the deck

Good practice applies here. Few words, plenty of graphics and visualisations of what you’re trying to communicate. Leave off the fine grain numbers. Keep it to at most 10 slides. Keep a good flow and tell a story – problem, solution, potential and viability. Close with a summary.

Here is the GoAnnotate deck that won us Startup Weekend Manchester for reference:

Don’t get caught up on the design (ours mimicked the website). The content is king. If you have a designer on hand utalise them but if you don’t a poor looking yet well constructed pitch is better than a good looking poorly constructed pitch.

One last thing to remember when making your deck is long is easy, short is hard.

Make the most of it

Make sure to grab people who can help you. They could be the organisers or coaches or they could even be from a competing team. Grab them!

Every Startup Weekend I’ve ever attended shares an open culture of collaboration. Get their opinions, use their skills or ‘borrow’ their ideas. Likewise offer the same in return. It’s cheesy to say but ultimately it’s less about the ‘winning’ and more about expanding your capabilities and skillset.

So in summary, it’s all pretty much good practice for your own startups. This is why Startup Weekend is so successful globally. It’s the perfect opportunity to brush up on your skills, maybe scratch an itch and meet new people (who could become future employees, employers or cofoudners).

I’ve shared my tips for a Startup Weekend, what are yours?

P.S. tickets still available for Startup Weekend Edinburgh and there will likely be a Startup Weekend coming to somewhere near you shortly.