My first international hackathon
As a Mexican female professional in tech, with the enthusiasm for challenges and the interest in meeting new people and cultures, participating in a hackathon is a great and exciting opportunity to quickly learn, grow and network. All in one and all in a few hours of hard work!
Last May, Laboratoria shared the opportunity with the Alumnae Community to participate in a hackathon organized by APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) and the Asia Foundation, so Ilse Centeno (a friend I met at Laboratoria) and I took this chance to participate. In addition to all the great things a hackathon can bring, this year’s APEC App Challenge was very special, since the challenge was to connect women entrepreneurs with experienced mentors in entrepreneurship and with investors who might have an interest in their companies. It was a very exciting prospect. In short: a hackathon in another country (Chile), with a very significant challenge for women who work in technology and with the unbeatable opportunity to compete with women from other countries and learn from them.
Many obstacles to overcome
I would like to share some of the challenges we had to face, even before we started working on the application proposal to participate in the hackathon.
A great challenge we had to face was the language: many of the participants and organizers only spoke English or another language aside from Spanish.
The application itself was also an incredible challenge, given that we did not know anything about entrepreneurship, and even less about women entrepreneurs in other parts of the world. When we looked deeper into the subject, we realized there is a scarcity of information in Spanish on the topic of entrepreneurship. Once you find useful information you must learn the entrepreneurship terminology and concepts used, which can be a limitation. In addition, the information is not fully accessible and the courses on entrepreneurship can be very expensive.
Learning from other women entrepreneurs
The next step was to find women entrepreneurs who could share their experience and above all who could tell us about the obstacles they had to face in order to propose a solution that could help them when starting a business. Ilse and I had the opportunity to interview two incredible women, Jezabel and Lorena. Jezabel had a cafeteria business that she ended up having to close because she was not able to develop a strong business model or have enough experience to realize on time that she had invested too much in making the place comfortable without making sure the business would actually work. Lorena, in the meantime, had already been running a floral arrangement business for a year. It was growing at a good pace, getting new customers and even had the possibility of taking her product to the rest of Mexico. Nevertheless, to do this she needed to build a team that could run the business so she could focus on the expansion of the company. She did not really feel prepared for it.
Our research activities helped us get an overview of the problems faced by women who want to start or grow a business. Thanks to these insights, we were able to propose a solution to the challenge: a social network for women entrepreneurs where they can access relevant information in their own languages, with guidance on how to build a business model based on the book “The LEAN startup” by Eric Ries. The idea is that they could also feature their businesses to find investors and mentors.
Facing real-life problems of the entrepreneurship journey
Building a social network in less than 36 hours is an impossible task and we knew it well, so my team decided to leave the most ambitious features of our project for future iterations and we focused on further research, on sketching a prototype in Figma, on building a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and….what about our business model? At this point of the challenge, there was a week left for the event and it was not clear how to monetize our solution. This was our biggest challenge, and, in contrast with other participants our team felt quite weak. Similar to the entrepreneurs we interviewed, we didn’t know how to build a business model for our solution. I am very sure that our idea had great potential because it gives women entrepreneurs the tools to successfully run a business. However, I admit that we fell right into one of the very problems we were trying to solve. Without a solid business model there is not much chance of competing in the market. The user experience is a surely a key factor of success, but so is the ability to implement an established business model.
The business model: as important as the solution
The experience of participating in this hackathon and solutions proposed by other participants changed the idea I had about the scope of what should be delivered in a hackathon. For a challenge of this magnitude, we need to present solid evidence to the jury on the financial viability of the solution and how it will positively impact society. This experience definitely raised the bar for me for this kind of contest. I find it important to share this story to encourage more women to participate so their paradigms, too, change, and as women we become stronger together.
