Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat Page B
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discussed this idea for a while, trying to determine how the money would be managed. Would one person get to be in control of the money and act as a sort of administrator, or would everyone be in control of their own money? What if someone wasn't meeting a savings goal? Would they be able to default for a month or borrow money against what they had already submitted? Wouldn't too many disputes about money result? The idea seemed to be growing more complicated.
The next version of their plan was for a site to which people were saving for a group trip, contributed equally, and could only take out their own money. But again, the question arose: Who would pay for this service? This continued to plague the group throughout the course of the weekend. On Sunday, one of the mentors who frequently attends Startup Weekend dropped by and started listening to the team, and immediately recognized a successful market strategy. A friend of hers who runs a travel website had often complained to her that he had no way of figuring out people's intentions when they came to his site. Were they daydreaming about a honeymoon in Hawaii with a husband they had yet to meet? Or were they planning a trip to Denver next week and pricing different options?
When the mentor heard about this team's plan, she immediately grasped the potential. A group of people saving for a trip together and actively putting money aside would be the perfect audience for travel websites. Even if some people backed out or some trips didn't happen, at least you would have a good idea of people's intentions. You could figure out where they wanted to go, how many people were traveling, when they planned to leave, what their budget was—all extremely valuable data. In addition to surveying people at Startup Weekend about whether they would use such a site to plan a trip, the team members also called travel company employees to ask if they would be interested in advertising to the site's users, or actually attaching the site to their own product.
Finding out whether there is a market for your product is a vital part of Startup Weekend; it's something we call idea validation . This theory of how to start a business has been around for a long time. Decades ago, it was called bootstrapping . Now, it's referred to as developing an agile or customer development model. We talk more about all of these terms in the next chapter—but whatever you call it, the most important thing to understand about this approach is that it is not a traditional business plan.
Instead of forming an elaborate strategy of what the entire product will look like, who the consumers will be, and how much money it's projected to make three years down the line, we recommend starting small and working with the information you can get immediately. For example: Who will want this product tomorrow? We always warn people in their Sunday presentations against predicting some ludicrous amount of revenue five years down the line. No hockey-stick growth curves allowed! There are generally no real justifications for their assumptions, and investors are not particularly interested in these projections anyway. They simply want to see the problem, the solution, and how you will ultimately find and satisfy your customers with your product.
A good place to start is with your immediate circle of friends. Throughout the event, you'll see team members wandering around, asking other people whether they can offer opinions on a product. The aforementioned group that was interested in helping men shop for women found a few females and asked them what kind of gifts they like. They then asked men what kind of help they needed when shopping for the women in their lives.
It's so easy these days to send out a survey to a larger group as well. It's as simple as finding a few relevant questions to ask and posting them on your Facebook page. The Internet-TV application
The next version of their plan was for a site to which people were saving for a group trip, contributed equally, and could only take out their own money. But again, the question arose: Who would pay for this service? This continued to plague the group throughout the course of the weekend. On Sunday, one of the mentors who frequently attends Startup Weekend dropped by and started listening to the team, and immediately recognized a successful market strategy. A friend of hers who runs a travel website had often complained to her that he had no way of figuring out people's intentions when they came to his site. Were they daydreaming about a honeymoon in Hawaii with a husband they had yet to meet? Or were they planning a trip to Denver next week and pricing different options?
When the mentor heard about this team's plan, she immediately grasped the potential. A group of people saving for a trip together and actively putting money aside would be the perfect audience for travel websites. Even if some people backed out or some trips didn't happen, at least you would have a good idea of people's intentions. You could figure out where they wanted to go, how many people were traveling, when they planned to leave, what their budget was—all extremely valuable data. In addition to surveying people at Startup Weekend about whether they would use such a site to plan a trip, the team members also called travel company employees to ask if they would be interested in advertising to the site's users, or actually attaching the site to their own product.
Finding out whether there is a market for your product is a vital part of Startup Weekend; it's something we call idea validation . This theory of how to start a business has been around for a long time. Decades ago, it was called bootstrapping . Now, it's referred to as developing an agile or customer development model. We talk more about all of these terms in the next chapter—but whatever you call it, the most important thing to understand about this approach is that it is not a traditional business plan.
Instead of forming an elaborate strategy of what the entire product will look like, who the consumers will be, and how much money it's projected to make three years down the line, we recommend starting small and working with the information you can get immediately. For example: Who will want this product tomorrow? We always warn people in their Sunday presentations against predicting some ludicrous amount of revenue five years down the line. No hockey-stick growth curves allowed! There are generally no real justifications for their assumptions, and investors are not particularly interested in these projections anyway. They simply want to see the problem, the solution, and how you will ultimately find and satisfy your customers with your product.
A good place to start is with your immediate circle of friends. Throughout the event, you'll see team members wandering around, asking other people whether they can offer opinions on a product. The aforementioned group that was interested in helping men shop for women found a few females and asked them what kind of gifts they like. They then asked men what kind of help they needed when shopping for the women in their lives.
It's so easy these days to send out a survey to a larger group as well. It's as simple as finding a few relevant questions to ask and posting them on your Facebook page. The Internet-TV application
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