Startup Weekend Tampere — impact analysis
Tampere saw its first Startup Weekend in March 2018, organized by an international team of volunteers from different backgrounds and hosted by Tribe Tampere. This is an analysis of how and why it was an important project for the Tampere entrepreneurial ecosystem.
What is Startup Weekend?
Startup Weekend is a weekend long event where people from different backgrounds come together, form teams on the spot, and work on business ideas that arise from the attendees themselves. During the weekend they focus on validating their business ideas in a lean fashion.
The teams get coaching from professionals from different fields, as well as some tools and techniques to help them move forward. At the end of the weekend all the teams pitch their ideas in front of a jury of professionals. It is a competition, so one team will come out as the winner.
However, Startup Weekend is mostly not about the competition. It’s about learning by doing and building meaningful connections with good people. And in some cases the projects built during Startup Weekend can end up turning into startups later.
The Startup Weekend concept involves providing the attendees with full meals during the weekend, which is the biggest expense, along with several smaller expenses. Startup Weekend events are financially self-sustained and dependent on external sponsorships.
Why was Startup Weekend needed in Tampere?
We had had Tribe Tampere members attending Startup Weekends in Oulu and Turku before with positive experiences. We felt that an event like this was needed in Tampere as well. Something to give people a chance to experience what the startup buzz is all about, without having to face the risks or commitments of actually starting a business.
Tribe Tampere opened its doors in September 2017, and the city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has been very active since that. This kind of very concrete encouragement towards entrepreneurship was still missing, though, and Startup Weekend seemed like the perfect answer to that need. On top of that, Tribe’s community space, P47, would serve perfectly as the event venue.
Also, Startup Weekend is a global concept with close to 3,000 events organized in 150 countries around the world. On that global map there were already Oulu, Turku and Helsinki represented, but not Tampere. It was time to change that.
We were able to assemble a motivated and highly competent team of volunteers willing to organize the event. This, combined with the previous things, led to the obvious conclusion — let’s do this.
Common effort
The project lasted from November 2017 to the actual event in the beginning of March 2018, with an additional couple of weeks for wrap-up. During the project we had great contribution from multiple different communities, organizations and companies.
The project team itself had representatives of Tribe Tampere’s core team members and board, Creativity Squads, Y-kampus and Tampere ES. Along with that, Tampere Startup Hub, Pirkanmaan nuoret yrittäjät and Y-kampus, all Tribe’s member organizations, sponsored the event. During the event weekend we also got invaluable voluntary help from several community members.
This is exactly the kind of cross-community collaboration that Tribe Tampere exists to enable and support. For that reason we were extremely happy to see such a wide range of contribution.
Special thanks to our platinum sponsors OP and Stora Enso for making the event financially possible.
Effort during the weekend
What blew us organizers away was the work ethic and morale with which the attendees worked on their projects during the weekend. On Saturday evening when we were about to close the doors for the night one team asked for 15 more minutes of working time. Also, despite the competitive element, there was a lot of collaboration and exchanging services between the teams.
Another impressive thing was the improvement all the teams displayed during the weekend. For every team there was a “checkpoint” pitch on Saturday to see how they were doing, a practice pitch on Sunday afternoon, and the final competition pitch as the culmination of the weekend on Sunday evening. After watching all of them, it was clear that each team was able to continuously develop both their project and their pitching skills during the weekend.
The projects themselves were very creative and diverse. There were, to name a few examples, an AI assisted solution to make online fashion shopping more user-friendly, a service to automate finding the cheapest possible mobile service provider and plan, a subscription service for delivering healthy food to your home for making healthy eating easier, and an AR mobile game for hunting down your friends.
We had ten coaches from different fields of expertise providing valuable support to the teams. For them the participation was voluntary, so we are very grateful that they offered their time and put in the effort. And so were the teams — the coaching was viewed on average as very helpful by the attendees.
For us organizers there were some very hectic and volatile moments, but thanks to a great team nothing stopped us from hosting a good event. We also had several Tribe Tampere members showing up and lending a hand when it was needed.
Visibility of Startup Weekend and Tribe Tampere
The weekend had an early start at Yle Radio Tampere, interviewed by Jyrki Hakanen Friday right at dawn. The interview can be heard on SoundCloud (in Finnish).
The event was noted in the blog of Tampere3, the soon-to-be-united new university that combines all the three universities in Tampere. You can read the article here (in Finnish).
Niia, an attendee and team leader of the team Freshbite that took the third place, wrote a blog post about her experience in Startup Weekend Tampere.
There was also a previous post in Tribe Tampere’s blog about the first feelings after the event written by Anna, a member of our organizer team.
Numbers
Here are some key numbers about the event:
- Almost 4 months working on the project, including wrap-up
- 45 attendees participating
- 1 visiting facilitator from Ireland, who’s plane was delayed for 4 hours on the runway due to a snow storm in Dublin
- 54 hours of attendees working on their projects
- 8 projects pitched at the end
- Attendees gave us an overall organizing score of 9.50 (the global average being 9.02)
- 80 % of the attendees said they would attend again
- The coaches, judges and sponsor representatives answered “How likely would you be to collaborate with us again in the future regarding similar events?” on a scale from 1 to 5 with an average of 4.7
- Way too many cups of coffee to count
- Way too few hours of sleep to count
Aftermath and effect on the ecosystem
The feedback that we got from both the attendees and the coaches, judges and sponsor representatives was in general very positive. From the organizer team’s point of view the high organizer score was obviously heartwarming. From Tribe Tampere’s point of view it was very pleasant to receive good feedback on the venue being well suited for events like this.
We know that at least three attendee projects have had further development after the event. There has also been collaboration between different teams, transcending the weekend’s competition.
The most valuable things that were achieved through organizing Startup Weekend were, in no particular order:
- Many attendees had their very first touch to startup entrepreneurship, a valuable learning experience and inspiration
- Still, even experienced entrepreneurs that attended enjoyed the event and got a lot out of it
- Valuable connections built between attendees, coaches, judges, sponsors and organizers, both inside Tampere and to other cities
- Attracting attendees all the way from — to list some cities — Helsinki, Espoo, Turku and Seinäjoki
- True cross-community collaboration in the Tampere entrepreneurial scene, both in organizing and in the wide variety of attendees from different fields
- Managing to pull off a large and intensive event organizing project with a self-organized, 100 % volunteer based team
- Successful sponsor collaboration that left the sponsors satisfied and open to collaboration in the future as well
- Some projects have continued after the event, some might even develop to become actual companies, and the attendees have been helping each other with their projects
- Tampere is now on the Techstars map of almost 3,000 Startup Weekends organized around the world
Once more: a huge thank you to everyone who made Startup Weekend Tampere possible!
See the full list of sponsors, coaches, judges and organizers on the event website.
