And so it begins..
On Friday evening, the celebrations kicked off with over 60 participants networking, discussing ideas and pitching to the crowd. Building around the strongest ideas, 9 teams were formed and the business building began. Including:
CookRight - Connecting personal chefs with households for a bespoke food experience and education.
Tango - A sex education box for parents to give to their teenagers for up to date and safe sex education.
Immersio - VR career counselling - using VR to help people figure out what careers they’d like to pursue.
Good Dog - Reduce single use plastics in dog food - think keep cups for dog food packaging.
Anti-bubble - News aggregator to get you out of the usual news bubble
Plant Possee - Subscription service to give you a new, rare and unique plant each month.
Cheap Boat Rental - marketplace matching boat goers with boat owners - think Airbnb for boats.
Commute with Me - Using the dead time commuting to work (on trains and busses) to network, meet new friends and people with common interests.
Pharma-Llama - Home delivery of pharmaceutical/prescription drugs
Then, throughout the weekend, with support of leading mentors including Hayley, Sam, Leila, Ben, Carl, James, Deepak, teams were taught Lean startup principles to help them develop their ideas, test against the correct target market, validate the idea for consumer demand and finally, prototype an innovative business model.
At Startup Weekend, no book, panel, speaker, or blog post is going to teach you what you need to know, the only way to learn is the experience of trying. So, the teams hustled their way through each day to learn, grow and discover everything they needed to know to become a successful startup founder.
Coffee, coffee and more coffee!
Designed to get your business ready, fast, participants enjoyed access to the resources and support to make things happen in a short period of time as well as being surrounded by smart, passionate people.
Sometimes, the hardest part of starting up is starting out. But, at Techstars Startup Weekend, you're immersed within the ideal environment for startup magic to happen. So, what better place to kickstart your startup idea?
Jasmin Ward, Startup Weekend Facilitator shared her feelings on the weekend. “It was one of the best startup weekends yet! All participants showed huge amounts of courage and agility over the weekend. I was super impressed with the quality of the final pitches - it certainly made it hard to pick a winner!”
Pitch and present
To conclude the weekend, each team pitched back their progress and ideas to a panel of community judges, including Nadine Saadi (Product Manager at ClickSend), Nate Sturcke (Founder of Skills of the Modern Age) and Tim Brewer (CEO & Co-Founder of Functionly).
With CookRight, a platform connecting personal chefs with households for a bespoke food experience and education, taking home the crown and winning a place in the Plus Eight pre-accelerator program in 2021, we can’t wait to see where they go from here.
And for all the participants, they’ve each taken giant leaps toward creating a business, becoming a founder, and are now connected with the right people and resources to go even further as an entrepreneur. So, until next time!
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