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The author was a participant at Startup Weekend Manila. A version of this article first appeared on WebGeek.ph, a community of web developers, designers, technopreneurs and geeks . The next Startup Weekend will be happening in Cebu, Philippines this Friday.
Glenn Santos from Mentors Dojo pitches on the final day.
I’ve been part of two Startup Weekends already and I must say there is nothing like the energy of founders trying to turn an idea into a startup in a scant 54 hours. Here are some things I did that helped me during the event.
1) The Pre-Startup Weekend
I made soft connections and went to tech events before Startup Weekend, asking around who’s going while I’m at it. I also caught up with a few friends who were going to the Weekend via Facebook, Twitter and through meetings offline.
I’ll explain later why I did this.
2) The Idea
Thinking up an idea can be a struggle. Here’s what I did.
I thought about my idea way before the Weekend. I tried to find out if startups needed a better way to connect with mentors and discovered that yes, they do. Essentially, a good idea is a solution that hasn’t existed yet, but solves a problem that is bugging people.
Believe in your idea and the problem it solves. For me, I really believe that mentorship is important for young businesses to thrive. If you believe your idea and how it will change the world, that goes a long way in attracting people to your team.
No idea yet? The most popular ideas are either fun or world changing. Again, make sure that you are really convinced yourself that the problem is worth solving. Read more
This article was republished with permission from the author’s blog.
Andreessen Horowitz recently revealed that its investment of US$250K in Instagram became $78 million. Thats a multiple of 312. Investing in early stage ventures is indeed very rewarding yet inherently risky. It thrives on multiple high risk bets out of which one or more would achieve high rewards.
But that certainly does not mean putting blind bets on anything that comes your way. Those who believe in “Spray and Pray” kind of investing are often losers in the long term.
Most VCs through their experience would have developed some sort of an internal braincloud (mental) checklist which gets ticked during the pitching sessions. Relying on mental checklists again is risky. Some or more of those check points might get sidelined if the idea falls into one of the soft spots of the more influential team members.
So how can venture capital funds systematically mitigate undue risks?
Here is a list of risks inherent in Venture investing along with practical risk mitigation strategies and if needed a ‘Jugaad’. Jugaad is a colloquial Indian term that means a creative idea, or a quick workaround to get through commercial, logistic or law issues. Read more
Recently, I did a talk at JFDI, a Y-combinator-quality incubator for South East Asia, where I shared how it is like to be an entrepreneur.
A lot of people tend to think: Being entrepreneur is about having a $1B+ home run in the first try. But it’s almost never the case. The best way to describe the life would be through an analogy of playing poker.
Why poker? Well, it is one of those few card games, where you are not playing against a bank/dealer, but rather amongst the players themselves. Winning a hand is not just a matter of having the best card, but also how you play the hand (since having the best card may not necessarily lead to a win). Read more
Grow fast, die young?
Does that have to be the mode for every fashion label, asks Carl Thompson, Co-founder of TradeGecko. Meet the former fashion label owner-turned digital entrepreneur who’s set himself a 100 day target to save small fashion labels worldwide.
Five years ago I launched Crowded Elevator, a fashion label in New Zealand. We started with a few boutique t-shirts and within a year we were wholesaling to over 50 retailers across New Zealand and Australia. It looked like the world was waiting for us. Then we died.
Wholesaling is no easy business. It takes a lot of time managing each section of the sales cycle. The administration required to manage inventory, orders, accounts, stockists, manufacturing and errors is completely overwhelming. If you don’t have the systems in place to handle such a workload the administration will kill all passion and ultimately the business, as it did for me. Read more
A version of this article was first published on Grey Review.
Facebook has over 850 million users worldwide. Out of that, a total of 194 million users are from Asia at the end of March 2012. Most of these users from the Southeast Asia region – 97 million or 54% of the total Facebook users in Asia. Some other observations on the latest Facebook in Asia statistics: Read more
Filed under News Stop, WebTags: afghanistan, Asia, bangladesh, bhutan, brunei, Cambodia, Facebook, Hong Kong, india, indonesia, Japan, laos, macau, Malaysia, maldives, mongolia, nepal, pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Social Media, South Korea, sri lanka, taiwan, thailand, vietnam
Vincent Ha, co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based Gushcloud, shares his not-so-smooth-sailing experience at SXSW 2012. Republished with permission from the company’s blog.
The sun was beating down on me. The Austin weather at SXSW is simultaneously cold and scorching. Some words come out of my mouth, but I’m not sure what I had just said. Whatever I said, it seems to have gotten a negative reaction.
‘Don’t give me another one of those we’re X for Y type of pitches. Talk to me like I’m an normal person!’
He was referring to my first elevator pitch attempt, “Gushcloud is like Task Rabbit for social media marketing.” But when I tried it at the last event, it seemed to work well!
Quick, think fast.
I brush it off and try again to illustrate what Gushcloud is with a relevant example (read our feature on Gushcloud).
“Sure, so what business do you do?”
“I build live chat software for businesses.”
Crap! B2B business! Can I cram it into the B2C example that I’ve been using all along? I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. I have a beer in hand and I take a swig. Read more
The best place for social entrepreneurship?
“Where’s the best place in the world for a social entrepreneur to live and build a social enterprise?”
That’s a tough question. It appears there are two schools of thought when it comes to attempting an answer: Get close or go big.
Some people believe that a social entrepreneur should be physically near to her target market. If she is working on poverty alleviation, then perhaps she should be in a city like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Or if she is fighting air or water pollution then perhaps Dhaka, Bangladesh. That certainly makes sense for a number of social entrepreneurs.
But then there are those of us who think that a social enterprise with the greatest potential for global impact requires a very specific type of climate to flourish. In my research, I’ve identified a few factors that deeply matter: Access to talent, access to funding, access to markets, a good business climate, and a supportive culture. From that perspective, highly developed cities rise to the top. Read more
Whether it’s in an interview in the trade magazines, in the college newspaper or on TV, CEOs of successful businesses like to paint a picture that belies the truth.
In some cases, it’s a romantic veneer over how hard they work, or how calculated they go about their management and this exists in part because the public wants an easily-digestible story of how to achieve results, or that it generally makes for a good uplifting reading.
Nobody likes to read a story of a struggle that includes constant repetition, problem-solving, manufacturing defects and late deliveries — it’s just “boring”. Read: Can’t sell newspapers or fill a business school auditorium.
The reality of it is much harsher yet simpler.
Read on for five common myths you’ll come across in interviews from successful CEOs (which you have to take with a generous pinch of salt): Read more
As someone with a creative background but interacting on a daily basis with local entrepreneurs and startups, I’ve found an interesting dialogue that often repeats itself: creatives looking to connect with entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who have a lack of creative talent within their businesses.
Why should these communities connect more?
Here’s 5 reasons:
1. At the bottom of it, both creative professionals and entrepreneurs value idea-creation and execution. Having this common denominator guarantees a meeting of minds.
2. Entrepreneurs often have the ideas but not necessarily the ability to execute them. Creatives do what they do because they have great execution skills. What better match could be made?
3. It’s not just about creating business opportunities. It’s also about collaboration, cross-pollination, prototyping and making better products together. What’s stopping the Singaporean startup scene from growing, is the creative thinking and processes that are tacit in the day-to-day practice of creatives,
4. At the end of the day, creatives and entrepreneurs are in the same business ecosystem. It is in the enlightened self-interest of both sides to ensure that the other succeeds. With great creative contributions to businesses, businesses can take their products and services to a higher level. And when businesses do that, they’ll call on the creatives to help realize more product offerings, and the cycle continues.
5. Because we can have more fun together. Who knows what will happen when creatives, hackers and entrepreneurs get together in a meaningful and engaged way?
At Relay Room, we’ve come up with a concept help increase interaction between the creative and entrepreneur scenes:Creative Mixer.
Creative Mixer brings together creatives, hackers, entrepreneurs into a single space to redefine creativity. The first event, held on 15 Dec 2011 at Smartspace, saw a whopping 88 people attending. At each event, we invite eight speakers to enlighten us with bite-sized presentations on creativity across their diverse fields.
Because we believe in collaboration between entrepreneurs, developers and creatives in design, photography, film, architecture, animation/illustration and writing, we would love to have you join us, to create a new, synergistic community of “creative entrepreneurs”.
Creative Mixer 2.0 is happening on 28th March 2012 at Sinema Old School. Registration can be made at www.flickevents.com/creativemixer. More details at www.creativemixer.co.
About the author
Sarah Cheng-De Winne is a media & performing arts professional. She is also the Business Development Manager of creative agency Relay Room.
Reality shows that feature entrepreneurs are getting popular these days (Angel’s Gate is one example), and these shows provide the perfect opportunity to present your brand and products to a nationwide audience at close to zero costs.
As a young start-up, our appearance on a show called “The Potential” (aired on Channel U earlier this month), which gave entrepreneurs some air time to pitch their products, had a significant impact on our website traffic and revenues.
While the application process, auditions and the actual shoot required days of hard work and rehearsals, the exposure that BoxInBlue.com got out of it was indeed worth the effort.
There is definitely nothing to lose to be on national TV. However, we realized that it is even more important to determine what we want to achieve in that ten minutes of airtime. Just as many of the Angel’s Gate participants have admitted, we do not go into the show expecting a million dollars of sales revenue (or million-dollar funding in the case of Angel’s Gate), but instead be able to maximise this airtime to bring our message across.
Here are five tips and key takeaways that I got from the experience, through the auditions, to the actual show. Read more
