Turning an idea into a start-up company in one weekend. It seems like an impossible task. Yet, 23 teams did it during the recent Amsterdam Startup Weekend , which took place from 5-7 July in Pakhuis de Zwijger. All teams found an idea within 52 hours, validat it with customers, turn it into a minimal product and made a flashy ‘pitch’ presentation. Below are the best ideas that came out of this.
Mix field of participants
Registration for a startup weekend is bas on three roles:
Developers who can and want to program; Business model to
Designers who can create a slick website, for example;
Business people who bring entrepreneurial knowlge.
The idea is that all roles are represent in each team. In this way, you also learn from each other’s skills and each team can also create a complete latvia phone number list proposition. The participants for this weekend came from all over Europe: from Greece to Israel to Brazil. Several participants had travell to the Netherlands especially to be able to participate in this weekend. Some participants had been working on their idea for a while and want to take it further.
Ingrid Schoots, CEO of beautybookers.nl , an already successful booking agency for beauty salons, participat with a new idea in the same sector. She realizes that such a weekend can be really valuable to test an idea as an entrepreneur.
Jury criteria
Each team will be judg at the end by a professional jury, consisting of startup professionals. For example, Herman Kienhuis , who invests in startups as director of Sanoma Ventures, Marijn Pijnenborg , board member at Iens , and Mike Lee , CEO of game company New Lemurs and also founder of app initiative Appsterdam. The jury will pay marketing list attention to three things in the assessment of the team:
Customer validation: how many customers were spoken to to determine their nes?
Execution: Has the team also built a concrete product (often an app or website)?
These things are completely in line with the philosophy of Lean startup: anyone who wants to start a company must first talk person_location_country to customers to determine what their nes are and then offer a minimal product as quickly as possible to see if customers are really willing to pay. Doing this in one weekend is a big task, but fortunately there are coaches walking around during the weekend to help the teams with this.