11 things I learnt participating at the first edition of Startup weekend Kathmandu in Feb 8–10, 2013.
- Summarize an idea in 1 min.
Speaking long is easy. But keeping it short is damn hard. Learning hard things pays off, always.
2. Convince people to vote for your idea.
Asking for vote is like selling your product. Literally you will become a better salesmen just by convincing people to vote for your idea.
3. Find team members.
Helps you introspect about yourself and makes you ask the difficult question. What do I lack? what do I need? and how to attract people with skills I don’t have?
4. Define minimum viable product (MVP).
When you have limited time. Your skill to decide what not to build is more important than what to build. Removing features is difficult than adding features. Helps you focus on the most important things first.
5. Discovering users/customers are important than building.
Of course, MVP can be used as tool to test and discover hypothesis. Even the landing page works. Surveys work too. But nothing works better than the selling to your potential customers/users.
6. A working MVP can actually be built in 54 hours.
Building is fun. When you have hackers and builders in your team for whom sleeping is not that important, and can code overnight. The MVP can be built.
7. How to pitch in 5 mins.
Helps you focus on the most important things. Also, makes you realize that pitching is different than general presentations and talks.
8. Listen to people.
Listening is difficult. You will get to listen to many people. This is one more skill you will get to practice. Pretending to listen is even more difficult. You will get to practice this as well, as you don’t want to be rude to anybody specially mentors.
9. Don’t listen to people who start with “how will it make money?” Listen to people who start with “how will it impact people’s life?”.
Listening to the first set of people gives you ideas to make money of the product which does not exist. Listening to the second set of people helps you asks questions which will help you find customers and build a product for them. I prefer second set of people.
10. Answering hard questions.
Learnt to answer questions such as “Who are your customers?, What problem your idea solves?, What is revenue model?, What is the business model? etc. Answering these questions are important.
11. Network with people.
You will make a lot new people. Most of them are really helpful and cordial. I am lucky to be still friends with a lot of people I met.
