Hackathons are for losers
Part 2 of a 3 part series on my experience at Startup Weekend SG 2018
In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here is my experience on Day 1.
Day 2: Those Judgy Mentors
Last week I told you, “We decided to get some good sleep after a long night to meet the next morning at 8 am.”
Following morning at 8 am: Nobody turned up at 8 am… but by 8.30 we had our hands full of some delicious breakfast and conversations were roaring.
We couldn’t wait to jot down all the brainstorming that had automagically happened in our heads overnight. I could already feel my adrenaline levels rising as we all set up our laptops at our worktable. One of the guys was enthusiastic enough to get his old-school clacking keyboard, a big sign that he was going to get comfortable locking himself in the building the whole day. He even brought one of those Ikea kids blackboard sets so our discussions would go smoother. It absolutely worked.
At the time, I didn’t even know that he was the one who had gotten it. I was full of coffee (a habit I had painstakingly dropped over the past year) and my brain was on hyperdrive. I had my own agenda for where this idea was going to go. We had to get out of the building as soon as possible and talk to loads of customers! I was speeding through the entire discussion, running my team through the basics of how a business canvas works. By the end of it, we decided to skip the scheduled talks designed to run us through exactly that. I grabbed some chalk and asked everyone one of the most fundamental questions of building a startup, who were our customers? It caught on like wildfire.
Like I mentioned last week, our team was working on the idea of a social enterprise that promotes recycling. Recycling is a cause that affects everyone and also one that everyone feels personally responsible for. That’s why the entire team was contributing. I even noticed the event cameramen capture our heated discussions over that tiny little board.
We had narrowed our customer list down to 4 types of people. The next task was to go talk to these people. So we split up. We had already created a WhatsApp group the previous night to stay on the same page. We sent our youngest guy (also the most charming person on the team) to go out there and talk to as many people as he could about where they felt they fit into the whole system. We created two sets of questionnaires, one for the common public and one for business owners. Two of my other teammates got cracking on the business interviews. In a matter of minutes, we were already getting huge support from the crowd. People were asking if we had a facebook page where they could follow our work. The misplaced excitement injected a surge of stress into the two of us manning our worktable. I asked the impossible of our developer. I asked him if he could build an android app in a day! At the time, I thought this was perfectly reasonable. It was my nerves talking…
Nonetheless, I focused my energy on getting our slides together for our pitch the same night and set up our Facebook page as fast as humanly possible. In under an hour, we had conducted 50 interviews with just the people around our building. By the end of it, our minds were buzzing and we finally decided to call it a morning and proceeded toward the amazing buffet set up for our lunch.
After another hefty meal, I noticed the food vendors at the venue. Our business customer response was going at snail’s pace. It was the weekend after all and no major company is going to give you a letter of consent on a Saturday morning over a phone call. So we talked to the vendors at the venue. Many of them were happy to support our fight to reduce plastic waste. If people brought their own reusable bags, they would cut costs on buying their own eco-friendly versions of packaging products. One of our business customers even served us liquid nitrogen desserts! Eventually, we got in touch with 5 such vendors at the event site alone. Most of them were the founders themselves who had come to support the hackathon and test out their own business marketing ideas. Things were moving very fast.
It was now time to check-in with our mentors. The 5 of us sat at a table where we were given exactly 15 min to explain our ideas and get feedback. Our group leader pitched the idea to our mentors and they loved the whole concept! They supported our marketing strategy and told us to go full speed ahead. My team left the mentor session with smiles plastered on their faces. That wasn’t the case for me. Having been through mentor sessions before, I couldn’t help but feel that something was fishy. All we had presented so far was our idea and how we would get people to become more eco-friendly.
We had not even scratched the surface of that one question that was bothering me the most, how would our company make money?
While the team resumed working on our pitch deck, I was still bothered by this. I did bring it up to the team leader before but I wanted to keep the moral high and waited for an opportune moment.
Our second mentor session came around the corner and it was my turn to pitch the idea. I noticed how much more difficult it was for me to pitch the idea because of that nagging question and I did a C+ job of it. This time the feedback was very different. This mentor was one of the founders of his own company and he was in love with their business model. He saw a huge similarity in our business model to theirs and told us to completely flip things around. He suggested that we run this more like a profitable business, forget about recycling and basically completely ditch our original idea! However, there was no clear direction of what exactly he thought was the perfect way we should have done this. All I do remember him saying is, “Don’t copy our business model though!”.
The team’s response this time was that of utter confusion. We did not want to stop being a social enterprise and we also had mixed feelings about the idea at this point. Mentor check-ins have always been stressful for me. If done too early (as they always feel at hackathons), they can have a major influence on the idea and along with it, the team morale. I saw the conversations completely changing into the negative. We spent quite some time discussing things when Robin dropped by to check on us. He heard us out and told us not to change too much too late.
So we stuck with our original pitch. Whatever had to be fixed would be fixed later. We prepared ourselves for the third, fourth and fifth opinions that were to come with our mock presentations.
By evening, our pitch deck was complete and we rehearsed with our team leader for the mock pitch. I talked him through laying emphasis on certain words, how to capture the audience’s attention and where to pause for a response. This part I really enjoyed but we had to rush this too, like everything else so far. We shouldn’t have spent so much effort putting the slides together. It was only when we got to the pitching arena that we were told there would be oral pitches only. So our team leader kept his slides on his phone for reference. We got in a happier mood seeing all the unicorn floaties around with the soft city lights and the bean bags sprawled across the terrace. We piled up on the floaties and took a super cheerful selfie!
Whatever we were, today, we had proven to ourselves that were a really good team!
My team’s emotional response to the mentor feedback was proof that every single one of us wanted to make this work. At the same time, I knew that my detachment from the same feedback would prove to be invaluable to the team. All I now needed was to see if the mock pitch mentors could see the big gaping hole in our business model that I could see too and that’s when I would drive my point home. I saw Merryl and their team was super excited to pitch their idea. Their pitch presentation went really smoothly but the mentors were wary of the tech required to support their idea. Since these were oral pitches, no one really was doing any product demos so I could see why it was difficult to make the judges imagine what they had in mind.
Then our team leader went ahead to pitch. He opened with this hilarious line that everybody on the team was super embarrassed to present with and had strictly told him not to use. It was a fail like we had warned but after that, he achieved a very clear flow of communicating our idea to the panel. Again, the delivery was very smooth and again, the feedback was hard for our team to take.
The mentors pointed to the same critical flaw that I had hoped they would bring up, our business model.
How were we going to make money off of forcing people to recycle more? Why would businesses support this idea if plastic was the cheapest alternative to any other material in the market? The economics didn’t make sense and this was a problem environmentalist have been trying to solve for decades. There was a good reason that there is a gap in the market. It’s because, in all these years, no one could manage to make people responsible for the plastic waste they produce. Saving a few cents or getting vouchers in return for the effort of reducing plastic waste was not a good bargain. We needed to drastically rethink this.
We had reached the end of Day 2 and had one night and one morning to put together our idea from scratch. Now we just needed to figure out how...
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