Thoughts from Startup Weekend Madrid
Startup Weekend Madrid concluded late last Sunday in the Vicálvaro district of Madrid. I had the pleasure of being on the Jury, and was lucky enough to have arrived a couple of days earlier to brush the worst rust off my Spanish: the Madrid event was conducted in Spanish while the teams were at least as international as at other Startup Weekends. Thanks to the organizers at Ellas2.org for the great event management and to the fellow members of the jury.
The level of ideas and quality of pitches was in general quite good. The ambition of most ideas should be geared up considerably, however, especially for the pitches. Most are presenting a vision of a business and not only demoing the coding efforts of the last 48 hours. So, I would’ve loved to see more ambition. The category winners are worth noting: Best team was awarded to Suscriptia (recurring order platform idea), most innovative to A Parkalo (parking space management and forecasting app) and best project to Pinche Toys (toys and games with offline and online parts). Congrats to the teams.
The SW format is interesting in that it brings together to a closed location people who potentially don’t know each other but who need to work on the same idea. This combination can mean that an idea is geared towards a consensus the team has, instead of being built around a clear consumer need. If there is a person or a subset of the team with the required understanding of the users, they need to act as the product advocate. Unless you are building something for people exactly like yourself, a closed location and a group of like-minded people can easily mean that the actual user need is lost. Just because you can imagine people using your product does not mean they would want to or need to.
The most valuable thing that you can bring to the intensive experience of a Startup Weekend is intimate consumer, user or customer knowledge. That’s the best platform to build your ideas on and makes it likelier that what you have been working on for a couple of days with little sleep is something that actually works for people. And that’s awesome.
Mikko Järvenpää, Marketing Geek, HackFwd
