I have a bit of experience with Startup Weekend, both as a participant and as an organizer. After attending my first one in St. John’s, and seeing how beneficial it is for participants and the local startup community, I had to help bring it to other people in Newfoundland. We’re about to have our second Startup Weekend in western Newfoundland, and here’s what you can expect to get out of it if you join us…
Personal & Business Connections
Both personal and business relationships are established at an event like this that can’t be replicated under any other circumstances. The life of an entrepreneur can be lonely sometimes, but never at Startup Weekend. When I was grouped with people to work on projects (that I honestly didn’t fully believe in at the beginning) we weren’t just a group of people, we were a team working toward a common goal. Not just to win the competition, but to do the best job we could to make our startup a reality. I still have a close connection with my teammates, and have since made multiple 7-hour drives to further work on and attend a launch party for the product that we worked on during that weekend.
In addition to those personal relationships, we also make a lot of business connections. You meet a lot of dedicated, passionate, and talented individuals who are (potential) entrepreneurs. Not just the organizers, mentors, sponsors, or judges, but also your future co-founder or life-saving problem solver could be one of your fellow participants. I’m also still in contact with some of those people and have sought insight and advice from them a lot since my time at Startup Weekend.
Confidence & Pride
Anyone who already has a business knows that there is a sense of pride when you hand over your business card to someone and get to say “I do this.” If you don’t own a business, that’s okay because you can start to get that feeling as you begin to find your legs in the business world. There is no better way to do that than going through a 54-hour business “boot camp.”
You not only get better at the talents you have, but you develop and/or learn about skills you never knew you had. Why? Because you have to. If your team only has five or six people, you each have a specialty, but you each also need to dabble in other areas in order to check all the boxes.
The sense of pride comes out of this thing that you’ve created with your teammates. Whether you’re pitching your own idea or working on someone else’s, you have an enormous amount of pride in the final product. If you are working on someone else’s idea, you will never love it as much as they do, but like me and my team, you’ll swell with pride when it becomes more than an idea and makes its way into the world.
Knowledge & Experience
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”
Groucho Marx
There is truly no better way to describe the wealth of knowledge and experience that you will gain not only from the work that you do during Startup Weekend, but also from the insight given to you by the organizers, mentors, sponsors, and judges. They’re involved because they’ve been through the wringer before, and know what they’re talking about. They advise participants based on their own experiences in the business world to help make the best possible projects come out of Startup Weekend.
Don’t forget that anything and everything you learn can help you make your own better business decisions in the future. Oh, and don’t forget that you will have these people as connections to learn more from them later as well!
Validation
I don’t know about you, but I question my own business chops sometimes…
- Can I make the right decisions?
- Do I know what I’m doing?
- Am I actually as good as I claim to be?
I think we all ask ourselves similar questions. Startup Weekend is a great place to test these assertions, then come out the other side knowing a lot more about yourself than you did before. Through my own experiences, I’ve had these questions tested and answered. Your skills and assumptions can be put to the test during an event like this, and you should embrace it and learn from it.
The other validation is about your idea. If you pitch a business idea, you can get an incredible amount of information that can help you make better decisions…
- How enthusiastic did people seem about it?
- How many votes did your idea get?
- How many participants signed up for your team?
- During your pitch how what kind of questions did people ask?
All of this is data that you can use to either pursue your idea further after Startup Weekend, or (possibly) put it to rest.
Fun
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou
This one may not appear in the brochures, but to me, fun is the most important part of Startup Weekend. Would I be involved with it again if I didn’t have a good time? The reason is largely because of the good people involved camaraderie we share, but it’s also because I loved the work that we were doing. All of the aforementioned qualities culminated and caused me to have a great time that was worth the two 7-hour drives and sleeping on a couch for a week (2015) and helping to organize Corner Brook’s first Startup Weekend (2016). If nothing else, at least these experiences have given me good stories to tell.
You have a story, too. Come spend the weekend with us and we’ll make sure it’s a good one!
Join us for Corner Brook’s second annual Startup Weekend, March 31 – April 2, 2017. Get more info and register here.
If you’re an entrepreneur or business owner in western Newfoundland, join our Facebook community here.
