Startup Weekend Geneva 2013

18 Nov 2013

swgva 2013

I assisted to Startup weekend geneva 2013 public events (talk and presentations). As a developer who read way too often hackernews, I’ll give my two cents.

First, I would have loved to be part of it, But I had prior commitment. Maybe next time!

Presentations were great, although prezi was a bit overused. Technical demos were mostly missing. 52 hours is really short but I would have loved to see more prototype…

As a snowboarded, I really liked the auto following camera drone for extreme sport. Only in Switzerland you get such idea .. such a rich world gadget! One of the problem they didn’t address is that the autonomy seems to be around 10-15min, and probably even less in the icy mountain air.

No launch page?

The minimum output of such weekend should be at the very least a public launch page. The attendance (at least 150 people) might register to get news from your startup. Not doing so is a big missed opportunity to get early adopter. Personally, I wanted to know more about the monkey team startup named boarderline but could not find their website. Let me know if you have it.

Getting users and building an audience should be done from the start. It is particular sad when you see the winner Braddme.com with no website (as of now, 1 day later). If you build a dating site where having users is your main problem, you have to do better. If they get some press and still didn’t setup anything, I won’t expect people to remember them.

You don’t need to be technical for that, you can use service like

That’s not hard and free. It probably take as much time then making 1 slide for the presentation.

Equity

What happened of company build during such event? Is it split equally between the participant? Will they compete between themselves if they have some idea breakthrough?

Some startup seems to have been in the making for years. What are getting the people that help them?

A very good use case of such event is then to come with some cool technology that you build and improve your market fit with the help of a lot of bright minds for free. And you get coaches too! Free cake anyone?

SWGVA 2010

I was curious of what happened of the first batch. Startup is not easy. Don’t get fooled by the survivorship bias.

So 1 out of 13 startups in the 2010 batch is still alive and it wasn’t one that won any price. Hopefully some of these project evolved, changed name and I wrongly assume they are dead, who knows. As always, perseverance is key!

Suggestions

Having a launch page obviously for every startup. I will email the organiser that I gladly help them with that.

Having some feedback from the public would be cool too. Maybe a poll to elect the winner. Let them decide what they like the best, which startup they think might make it, give suggestion about bad assumption the startup is doing, etc.. Maybe here lie an idea for a feedback startup!? With the number of startup weekend in the world, you have a market ;-) Profit! What are you waiting?