On joining Startup Weekend Tokyo Fintech (and ending up winning the whole thing)
What do you do on week-ends when you’re a Le Wagon student living in Tokyo for a couple of months? You join Startup Weekend! The Tokyoite tech events scene really grew over the past couple of years, and whether you’re into AI, Crypto or just want to listen to some inspiring founder stories, you’ll probably find an event to join any day of the week.
While most of our students join evening events during weekdays, some just take it to the next level: They join events during the week-end. The WHOLE week-end. Held in Japanese. This is what Taras — a student of our fourth batch here in Tokyo — did, and his team ended up winning the whole thing! Here you go for a pretty unusual Tokyo experience.
Never heard of Startup Weekend?
If you’re not familiar with the formula of Startup Weekend, this is what to expect: participants will gather on Friday evening, pitch ideas, form teams, and hack their way to the final judging session on Sunday afternoon. It’s usually very hands-on, and at the end of the hackathon teams are expected not only to pitch an idea, but to actually demo a working prototype (at least if they want a shot at winning).
Taras also has some advice for those who consider joining “Personally I joined because I wanted to challenge myself and put in practice the skills I have just acquired with the bootcamp. And it made quite a difference compared to the first hackathon I joined back in Ukraine before! Overall, I’d advise not to overthink too much if you want to join one: just go for it, especially if the main topic is interesting for you. It might be somewhat intimidating at first, especially for those with limited tech skills, but a team needs a bit of every skill to perform”.
Paying with your vocal cords
So what did Taras chose to work on? “I picked a project focused on an emerging area of voice payments. Masanobu-san who pitched the idea demonstrated great enthusiasm and it was obvious that he devoted quite some time to do his research prior to the event. I just felt it was a good fit for me” he starts, “The team ended up being 6 people: 3 Japanese, 2 Mongolians, and me, a Ukrainian (laughs). We communicated in Japanese 90% of the time, which was mostly ok, except for when one or another teammate got too excited about a new idea and spoke really fast”. Believe it or not, Tokyo actually has a Startup Weekend organized almost every week “This one was roughly 70 people, and we ended up with 12 different projects”.
Our students get used to shipping prototypes quickly, but for a “normal” person, what is delivered over just 2 days can be quite impressive. “I basically took care of the whole website for our application, both design and code. It shows general information, but most importantly, it contains the user interface that enables you to set limits, area of usage, as well as an interface for previous transactions”. So how did the app itself work? “As the name Voicy Pay suggests, the idea is to enable user to validate payment using voice recognition. Why voice? Well, it has pros and cons. Some people are not really comfortable with face recognition for example, and fingerprint is very accurate, but tends to lose its accuracy over time, not to mention the cost of hardware and major risks with data storage and access. On the other hand, voice recognition software and devices are cheap, available off-the-shelf and quite reliable with continuous improvements even as we speak”. And for that, Taras’ team did not have to look very far: “We just used Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, it was pretty straightforward”.
And the winner is…
So we spoiled a bit the result with the title, but guess what: Taras and his team ended up winning the whole thing! “I don’t really have any advice on ‘how to win’, but I guess team spirit played a big part. Masanobu-san who initially pitched the idea created an environment from the outset, where everybody was really involved and responsible for the project’s success. We made a prototype with Amazon Echo, and it worked just the way we expected it to work even during the final demo in front of the judges, so that probably helped (laughs)”.
The prize money that is usually at stake during Startup Weekends is not enough to kick-start a “real” startup, but you can actually connect with potential help during the event itself “We were approached by a couple of interested parties, including potential angel investors and a Tokyo-based business incubator. We’re currently considering our next step, while each team member determines how much of their time they are ready to devote to the project from now on”.
Congratulations Taras for the win, and a big thank you for your time!
