Karmathon — Turning Entrepreneurship On Its Head
The life of an entrepreneur is tough. Your ideas are rejected repeatedly, you have to apologize to your mother for not having a “real” job and people mock you for being a dreamer. Even after you managed to raise the first round of funding it doesn’t get easier. Competing with big enterprises over talent and market share can be depressing and will often force you to question yourself.
At Aleph, we believe that the power of community can ease this process. We experienced this power of community with the Spreadsheet and decided to scale it with Karma. Karma is a platform for founders to seek advice and ask for help from others, who are often more experienced entrepreneurs.
When Aur Saraf, an entrepreneur from our community, suggested that Aleph should host a hackathon for founders to build tools that make entrepreneurship less daunting, we were very excited. This embodied the Karma spirit and so we launched Karmathon.
100 Entrepreneurs got together on Purim day, and instead of focusing on their companies and their individual challenges, spent the day tackling the issues that make others’ path of entrepreneurship so challenging.
We also invited inspirational speakers from four social ventures: MEET, TOM, SpaceIL and Digital Israel, to pitch to the founders and encourage them to join these rewarding initiatives. We hope that added to the positive karma and motivation.
After 24 hours and countless cups of coffee, the participants presented 16 products. For the benefit of the broader community, we are listing a few below. We hope you find these products useful. You have the opportunity to help improve them by providing feedback and sharing information.
First Place: ProblemHunter
Do you have a problem that needs to be solved? Are you looking for someone to solve it? Do you want to build a new company but don’t have a good idea? ProblemHunter is the service for you. This is where you can post, vote or look for problems that need solving. Team: Shahar Nechmad, Tamara Wiesen
Second Place: Vergil
Your guide through regulation hell. On Vergil you can find templates of legal documents and get a professional advice from freelance lawyers. Team: Koren Grinshpoon, Alon Grinshpoon
Third Place: Onebill
Onebill is a reporting tool that automatically sorts, tracks and summarises your expense invoices. To use it simply place all of your invoices in a designated dropbox folder and click update. Onebill then passes, categorises and summarises those invoices. As a final stage it organizes the invoices in your dropbox folder. The web-app provides a dashboard containing the summary information as well as predictions for the future based on historical data. Team: Anna & Ben Cates
Crowdsourced knowledge-sharing kit: all you need to know when launching your startup in one place. From recommended reading lists to the right actions you need to take as a first-time entrepreneur. Help upgrade this kit by sharing your own lists, recommended books and manuals. Team: Ilit Raz, Sagi Manman, Tomer Shohet, Dalit Heldenberg, Sophie Allweis
Through a gamified quiz, companies are encouraged to think about who they are and where they want to be. The purpose is to plan and build a company with culture metrics in mind and update them as the company grows. Team: Rachel Brender, Noam Singer, Jonathan Seroussi, Dave Orian
No need to send your bizdev team to conferences abroad anymore. Yewwo connects companies with local representatives who can attend conferences on behalf of the company and save a lot of time and money. Team: Avinoam Roz, Adi Omesy, Matan Levi
BetaProd is a platform that connects product builders with beta testers. Be the first to try the coolest new digital products and give entrepreneurs your personal insights and feedback. Team: Doron Somech, Ehren Goossens, Oren Reuveni, Tom Reuveni
Loosea- coming soon
A private chat room where you can share your content and files, on the spot without using any personal details. No need for account creation, app installation or email confirmation. Team: Jacob Dvir, Chagay Shomrony
Bizwiz- coming soon
Bizwiz is an online tool to help pre-seed startups create interactive financial models in minutes. No more hours of excels and headaches. Team: Yossi Konijn, Odelia Gal, Adir Amsalem, Ram Nathaniel
We are pleased that so many products built by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs came out of the Karmathon. However, Karmathon wasn’t only about building products, it was about meeting new people and building lasting friendships. People got to know each other and ignited discussions around how we can work together to build great companies out of Israel.
We would like to thank all the wonderful people who helped make this event a success and invite you to inundate us with ideas that will help scale our awesome community.
See you at the next Karmathon!
