What I learnt from Startup Weekend Manchester

This weekend I attended Startup Weekend Manchester, hosted at the soon-to-be-opened TechHub Manchester space. The idea I pitched was probably quite an ambitious one, and different to most of the other ones there in that it was aimed as a service to be delivered to a very niche selection of business, rather than a mass-market product. Regardless I got a few bits of interest and managed to form a small team to develop the business plan with Ian Horst, David Haikney and Josh R and the weekend got underway.

We put together what I thought was a sound pitch (BBC Fusion training kicking in there) and I think we delivered it well, but ultimately the idea didn’t get much traction from the judges and we didn’t finish in the winning 3, which was disappointing. I’m pretty damn passionate about the idea and have absolute dedication that the time is right now to disrupt the market so it was disappointing to not be able to share that passion.

However, this has given me a kick up the butt to really make some traction on the problem and start tackling some of the difficult problems I’ve been putting off for doing – I’ve now got a about half a notebook full of concepts, ideas, potential graph structures and high-level algorithms to tackle the problem… I also learnt a few things from the weekend – mainly that I need to get customer validation, and the way to do that is to get Molly 2.0 complete and mancunia.mobi running off the new stack, rather than just being timetable-driven as now (which is largely uninteresting). Lack of design ability and time continues to stymie me though. Once this is done I can put it in front of people and get their feedback, and then I also need to deliver proof that I’ve got the skill to build such a solution.

The other thing is something I’ve known for a while now, but this weekend has really highlighted for me – I need a co-founder who’s as passionate about disrupting the transport data industry as I am, and who has the skills I don’t have, specifically the people and business skills. And I still don’t know how to find such a co-founder in Manchester – most other people I know who are interested in the area of open data or transport data are technical, or already involved in startups of some kind. But maybe you’re reading this blog? Who knows, but it’s something I really need to drive forward on – network more, and meet more people… i.e., my weaknesses.

Do I have any criticisms about the weekend? Well, I was hoping to find a co-founder and actually get some traction on my idea from other people, and I got none of that. Startup Weekend wasn’t actually what I expected – specifically the rule about not being able to develop prototypes or do work in advance (other than coming up with a thought-out idea) hindered me a lot, and was surprising to me – it seemed that the competition aspect was focussed upon more than the “let’s start businesses” aspect. Non-mass-market products are hard to validate over a weekend, and the cynic in me asks if there’s much value in a business that can essentially be formed and build it’s product over a weekend (despite being billed as not a hackathon, the judges did praise teams which managed to get an MVP built over the course of the weekend) – this was probably our main failing, we were pitching a technically complex product with no demo to prove that we could deliver on it. My other main criticism was the lack of feedback we got after our final pitches – other than a handful of comments and praise for the winning 3, the other teams got almost zero feedback from the judges. I’m guessing our failure was down to the lack of validation we got for our idea from customers and a technically complex idea with no proof, but I could be wrong.

Do I regret going to Startup Weekend? Not one bit. It’s given me the motivation I need to actually make more progress on my own technical work. Will I be going to another one? Probably not.