Just got back from the Glacier Startup Weekend. This is an event sponsored by Google and others and they seem to have a lot of them, and since I'd never seen it mentioned here I thought I'd share my experience with fellow goatherders.
Glacier means Glacier Park area of Montana, so I wasn't expecting much of a turnout. Surprise - there were 140 people there at the kickoff event Friday night, and 45 one-minute pitches for ideas. After the pitches the people who were there to start a company ("Start a company in 54 hours" is the event tagline) voted on the pitches, then the top 10 became the projects for the weekend. The guy I was standing next to pitched "CarFax for homes", which seemed like a great idea, so I joined his team.
Saturday morning the serious business of starting a business started, and of course that means lots of sticky notes on business model wall sheets and talking to anyone and everyone. What I learned here was more real-life hammering in the head of what fastlaners already know - you HAVE to talk to people. Nobody cares about that awesome app you coded yourself in your basement because they've never heard of it and it's not really what they wanted. Contact contacts contacts people. One of the coaches was a realtor that said "Oh I have over 80 realtors in my contact list, how many do you want to talk to?" One of the other teams (who won second place) got a hold of the CEO of Jelly Belly and had secured Jelly Belly and two other companies as buyers of their Montana name-brand beet sugar. Yep, beet sugar...that team walked out of there today with a commitment from a company that uses 60,000 gallons of sugar a day. Turns out they had been importing non-GMO sugar from Thailand because they couldn't find a US supplier. How are you going to find out that kind of info sitting in your basement? You're not! You HAVE to put yourself out there and talk to people you don't know, there is just no other way.
So validation, a favorite topic here as well. It turns out cars and houses are different in some very significant and crucial ways. While everyone loved the "carfax for homes" pitch the reality of implementing it was another story. Basically all the stakeholders were incentivized to hoard their information and work against each other. Still I was surprised to find out how eager people are to help. One realtor who I barely knew spent 40 minutes talking to our team and had all kinds of great suggestions, and insights into the pain points and problems he encountered as a house hustler. That enthusiasm and energy kept us going for some time trying to pivot to some variation of the original idea that would work, but by 8pm Saturday night it was clear that validation had done its job. The idea wasn't going to work, and there wasn't any compelling alternative. This is great! Thousands of businesses have wasted many years and countless dollars on ideas that sounded good but had never gone thru a solid validation process. I have to admit, if someone told me they were doing a carfax for homes company and needed a coder, I might have taken the gig. Instead we learned that the business was unlikely to ever work in just half a day and saved all the money and grief that would have come about from trying to start a doomed business. Sometimes you're going to find out your great idea can't work, and that's fine.
I had pitched, second to last, and pretty much almost as a joke, my idea of snack boxes for hackers (and fastlaners, and anyone with a go-go lifestyle) featuring a blend of meal replacement foods, "energy" products, and unique snacks that your friends have never heard of. A few times earlier I had said "we can always do hacker snax" and the other two guys finally went for it. Off to wally world and a supermarket to blow a pile of cash on suitable product, luckily I'd been idly kicking this idea around since last spring and already knew exactly what I needed to get. Old post-its in trash, all new post-its on the business canvas wall sheet, lots of laptop time (how many college students in the us? how much does naturebox.com charge? can you put those receipts in this spreadsheet?). Sometime around 4am I had wordpress all set up on a new virtual server for the designer and passed out.
Sunday morning - disaster! I made the mistake of sleeping in, and by the time I got back to the event the other two team members decided to give up again. I convinced one of them to stick around, and in less than 5 hours we:
- put together a presentation
- with actual numbers for potential audience, costs, value propositions, and the many other hard questions we knew the judges wanted answered
- ran around with a box of snacks asking people how much they'd pay to have it shipped to their house and got feedback face-to-face from real people with a prototype product in hand
3:30pm, demo day time. All but one other team had 4 to 6 people and pretty much their original ideas. I was surprised by how much some of the teams had gotten done. One two-man team had a functional app, some had videos, all of them had slick presentations. I was still gonna do this, so I had the most barebones powerpoint presentation ever, a box of snacks, a one-page wordpress site (don't say I never learned anything from you guys), and a compelling pitch. I didn't win, of course, that would have been an insult to the other teams, but I got amazing feedback. Tons of people told me they liked the idea and the name, and gave me ideas I wouldn't have come up with myself. One person said I could send these to workplaces as an alternative to snack machines, another mentioned he overheard some of the kids present saying they thought it was awesome - somehow it hadn't occurred to me that kids would be a natural market for an image- heavy food product (would probably need to cut out the caffeinated stuff tho). Everyone was super enthusiastic and supportive. Again, you will never get this kind of vibe sitting in your basement.
So I learned a lot, and more importantly, I validated an idea I've been kicking around for almost half a year without really doing anything with. I also found out there's a monthly programmer's meetup, so I'll have ongoing contact with some of the people I met, and thus their network of contacts, and their insights, ideas, and suggestions. If this event or one like it (I see someone posted about a lean startup event in new jersey today) is coming up in your area, GO!
Obligatory shameless plug: The Hacker Snax "site" is live at hackersnax.com, and the pictured box is actually for sale, and you can send an email to the address there and ask me about buying it, or anything else. Now that I've validated the idea I have much more confidence that it'll work, not least because I can always look at a legal pad full of testimonials like "I love snacks!" and "Great idea!" and "I would buy this!", along with actual prices real people have told me they'd pay for it.
Glacier means Glacier Park area of Montana, so I wasn't expecting much of a turnout. Surprise - there were 140 people there at the kickoff event Friday night, and 45 one-minute pitches for ideas. After the pitches the people who were there to start a company ("Start a company in 54 hours" is the event tagline) voted on the pitches, then the top 10 became the projects for the weekend. The guy I was standing next to pitched "CarFax for homes", which seemed like a great idea, so I joined his team.
Saturday morning the serious business of starting a business started, and of course that means lots of sticky notes on business model wall sheets and talking to anyone and everyone. What I learned here was more real-life hammering in the head of what fastlaners already know - you HAVE to talk to people. Nobody cares about that awesome app you coded yourself in your basement because they've never heard of it and it's not really what they wanted. Contact contacts contacts people. One of the coaches was a realtor that said "Oh I have over 80 realtors in my contact list, how many do you want to talk to?" One of the other teams (who won second place) got a hold of the CEO of Jelly Belly and had secured Jelly Belly and two other companies as buyers of their Montana name-brand beet sugar. Yep, beet sugar...that team walked out of there today with a commitment from a company that uses 60,000 gallons of sugar a day. Turns out they had been importing non-GMO sugar from Thailand because they couldn't find a US supplier. How are you going to find out that kind of info sitting in your basement? You're not! You HAVE to put yourself out there and talk to people you don't know, there is just no other way.
So validation, a favorite topic here as well. It turns out cars and houses are different in some very significant and crucial ways. While everyone loved the "carfax for homes" pitch the reality of implementing it was another story. Basically all the stakeholders were incentivized to hoard their information and work against each other. Still I was surprised to find out how eager people are to help. One realtor who I barely knew spent 40 minutes talking to our team and had all kinds of great suggestions, and insights into the pain points and problems he encountered as a house hustler. That enthusiasm and energy kept us going for some time trying to pivot to some variation of the original idea that would work, but by 8pm Saturday night it was clear that validation had done its job. The idea wasn't going to work, and there wasn't any compelling alternative. This is great! Thousands of businesses have wasted many years and countless dollars on ideas that sounded good but had never gone thru a solid validation process. I have to admit, if someone told me they were doing a carfax for homes company and needed a coder, I might have taken the gig. Instead we learned that the business was unlikely to ever work in just half a day and saved all the money and grief that would have come about from trying to start a doomed business. Sometimes you're going to find out your great idea can't work, and that's fine.
I had pitched, second to last, and pretty much almost as a joke, my idea of snack boxes for hackers (and fastlaners, and anyone with a go-go lifestyle) featuring a blend of meal replacement foods, "energy" products, and unique snacks that your friends have never heard of. A few times earlier I had said "we can always do hacker snax" and the other two guys finally went for it. Off to wally world and a supermarket to blow a pile of cash on suitable product, luckily I'd been idly kicking this idea around since last spring and already knew exactly what I needed to get. Old post-its in trash, all new post-its on the business canvas wall sheet, lots of laptop time (how many college students in the us? how much does naturebox.com charge? can you put those receipts in this spreadsheet?). Sometime around 4am I had wordpress all set up on a new virtual server for the designer and passed out.
Sunday morning - disaster! I made the mistake of sleeping in, and by the time I got back to the event the other two team members decided to give up again. I convinced one of them to stick around, and in less than 5 hours we:
- put together a presentation
- with actual numbers for potential audience, costs, value propositions, and the many other hard questions we knew the judges wanted answered
- ran around with a box of snacks asking people how much they'd pay to have it shipped to their house and got feedback face-to-face from real people with a prototype product in hand
3:30pm, demo day time. All but one other team had 4 to 6 people and pretty much their original ideas. I was surprised by how much some of the teams had gotten done. One two-man team had a functional app, some had videos, all of them had slick presentations. I was still gonna do this, so I had the most barebones powerpoint presentation ever, a box of snacks, a one-page wordpress site (don't say I never learned anything from you guys), and a compelling pitch. I didn't win, of course, that would have been an insult to the other teams, but I got amazing feedback. Tons of people told me they liked the idea and the name, and gave me ideas I wouldn't have come up with myself. One person said I could send these to workplaces as an alternative to snack machines, another mentioned he overheard some of the kids present saying they thought it was awesome - somehow it hadn't occurred to me that kids would be a natural market for an image- heavy food product (would probably need to cut out the caffeinated stuff tho). Everyone was super enthusiastic and supportive. Again, you will never get this kind of vibe sitting in your basement.
So I learned a lot, and more importantly, I validated an idea I've been kicking around for almost half a year without really doing anything with. I also found out there's a monthly programmer's meetup, so I'll have ongoing contact with some of the people I met, and thus their network of contacts, and their insights, ideas, and suggestions. If this event or one like it (I see someone posted about a lean startup event in new jersey today) is coming up in your area, GO!
Obligatory shameless plug: The Hacker Snax "site" is live at hackersnax.com, and the pictured box is actually for sale, and you can send an email to the address there and ask me about buying it, or anything else. Now that I've validated the idea I have much more confidence that it'll work, not least because I can always look at a legal pad full of testimonials like "I love snacks!" and "Great idea!" and "I would buy this!", along with actual prices real people have told me they'd pay for it.
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