How To Win Startup Weekend

After winning last year’s SW and founding a company 4 months later, here’s my advice

A year ago I won Startup Weekend UBC. Since that time my entire life has changed. I’ve started a company, left school and had the time of my life working on things that I love and nothing else.

In honor of that one year anniversary I thought I would share some insight into how our team won startup weekend and what I’ve learned since founding my startup SkyRocket.

1.) Pick a kickass idea… but don’t be afraid to pivot
None of these receipt apps or me too products. The teams that win startup weekend are the ones that think boldly and choose a big problem that resonates with judges and people you are able to speak with during customer development day.

After getting “out of the building,” if you learn that your idea isn’t resonating with people, don’t be afraid to pivot.

2.) From 9-5 on Saturday and Sunday spend at least 80% of your time talking to customers
Nothing validates a killer idea like a wait list of 50-100 people. There are a lot of great blog posts out there on the subject of customer development and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last 12 months it is that nothing is more important than talking to your customer.

Here’s how I’d go about it:

1. Designate half of your team to building (designing mockups, writing code, etc) and half of it to customer development and presenting (marketing, talking to people and promoting).
2. Those customer development team members should head to the nearest starbucks or busy place and talk to 10 people per hour or roughly a new person every 5 minutes (with a 10 minutes coffee break). If two of you do that you could talk to 160 people on Saturday and 120-160 on Sunday (depending on how long you need to spend on the presentation).
3. Ask those people if you’d mind grabbing their email address in case you have any follow up questions.
4. Once you have it, ask them if they want to be emailed once the product is launched.

Ash Maurya has a great way of conducting customer interviews that I’d recommend checking out here:

The Achilles Heel of Customer Development

Cindy Alvarez is also a good person to follow on Quora to learn more about the subject.

3.) Use www.justinmind.com/ to design mockups.
While the hackers hack and the shmoozers shmooze prospective customers, one person should be in charge of mockups, web testing (more on this below) and the presentation.

This person should spend about 1-3 hours designing mockups and then creating product images like this

4.) Build a landing page on Saturday night using Unbounce
You don’t necessarily need to connect it to a domain, but build a landing page on Saturday night once you’ve validated your idea with ~100 people. Use the images that you created on Prototyper Pro and spend about 45 minutes to an hour building an unbounce page.

Include a call-to-action button that collects email addresses of interested visitors.

5.) Broadcast your idea to the masses!
Once you have a landing page and some screenshots, have everyone on your team blast out a facebook post, tweet and linkedin message and then have 2 people focus on the larger channels like Hacker News and Reddit.

Our post on Reddit looked like this:

“A startup that is going to disrupt the airline industry!”

Then we asked readers for feedback and got tons of comments and traffic.
A couple hours after the first one use a title like this:

“Help! We need feedback on a startup weekend idea!”

6.) Collect emails and metrics
Aim to try and get more than 500 visitors between all of your friends posts and your Reddit and Hacker News activity. From this track how many people convert. If you can get a really good conversion rate, then put that in your presentation.

7.) Make a killer presentation
The last thing you’ll want to do on Saturday night and throughout the day on Sunday is assign someone to the job of creating a Prezi presentation.

Follow Sequoia Capital’s guidelines and hit all the basics (market size, product, feedback, go to market strategy, why you think you can succeed):

Grove by Sequoia Capital
Here’s our presentation from last year JumpSeat

8.) Enjoy every hour of it
At last years Startup Weekend I met some of my best friends. There’s no other atmosphere like SW, so soak up every minute of it and try to meet as many people as possible. Some of my best friends were on other teams, so don’t be afraid to network a bit.

Here are a couple other resources worth mentioning:
Business Model Canvas Optimized for Lean Startup — A great way to map out your business model canvas on the computer.

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