Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

My first start-up weekend (in Brussels). (for more info: http://www.brussels.startupweekend.org/)

54 hours, 1 team, tons of coffee. It doesn’t take much more to create a start-up.

Friday:

I prepared a list of ideas the week before. If you are planning to pitch on a start-up weekend, I would suggest that you just pick one or two ideas because there are a lot of people that want to pitch in a short period. I discussed some ideas with friends before to get a grip on their reaction. My idea didn’t get picked but I was contacted to work on it later on. Some ‘captains’ were actively composing their team because they wanted to combine different skills.

Saturday:

Developing your product/service in just one weekend is a tradeoff between wasting time on discussions and building the wrong things because you don’t get enough feedback from the team or from your users (eg. lean start-up). It’s thus important to get some agreement in the team on the concept in the short term. 3 of the 11 teams stopped working during the weekend because of different reasons but this was one of the main issues. We splitted up in two smaller subteams: one focusing on the business side and the other on the technical aspects. We showed each other our progress and discussed issues on a regular basis so that the whole team was posted on the progress and we could help out each other.

Keeping your team motivated is a great challenge, especially in the late hours. We did this by ‘celebrating’ each small step in the progress to a working product.

The feedback of the experts was very helpful because you notice that they know the tricks. There were also some speakers as a welcome intermezzo; we were not able to attend all these speeches because we wanted to build a product that worked to show something on the final pitching moment. We already started working on our presentation/pitch on Saturday.

Imag0188
 

Sunday:

We used the technology of emotive.  http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html Our team attracted a lot of attention while we were working because people were interested in this new technology. We had to deliver on Sunday and there were some last minute issues; at that moment you could really feel the energy in the air. We were not able to demonstrate our robot but we were still able to convince the jury of the value of our project and won ‘the mad scientist’ award (heck we even had a robot!).

Conclusion:

I’ve met some incredible people this weekend and I will definitly sign up for the next edition!

I would like to thank the organizers of the event (@leoexter @ramonsuarez @beneworld @belgianfounders) and everyone who made this possible ;)

Kodesk was the final winner, congrats! (http://www.kodesk.com)