My First Hackathon: Startup Weekend Nairobi
This was immediately after I graduated from University and it was November 2013. No major formal experience in startups but I was sizzling with ideas that I believed will change the world.
Startup Weekend is a 54-hour weekend event, during which groups of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more pitch ideas for new startup companies, form teams around those ideas, and work to develop a working prototype, demo, or presentation by Sunday evening. The event was organised by tech enthusiasts in Nairobi and was hosted in Strathmore University. I tried to convince my friends to join me but they declined since it was a paid [$10 pp] event.
My bright idea was building all-in-one application for fitness centres that include member management,performance tracking,payments,schedules etc. it was all in my head but (un)fortunately,I couldn't pitch it to the crowd the way I visualised it in my head. I was given 90 seconds and I barely even introduced myself and it was over. The crowd voted and my idea didn't make it to be top 15 ideas to be developed and worked on in the next remaining hours of the 3 day hackathon. I joined another startup team,my former classmate was a member and they let me hack with them. We met the next day to work on the pitch deck and DEMO of the app. My team was building a work flow app that will automate at least some degree, a process or processes that are usually business related but can be any process that requires a series of steps to be automated. I didnt had previous knowledge that my team members had a prototype and a registered company before even the hackathon started. None of us was good at pitching because of our tech [behind the laptop Ninjas] backgrounds but Duggan took the bullet for the team and did the presentation. He wasn't perfect but he tried his best. We didn't make it to the top 4 but we made to the top 10. We were offered a working space and mentorship at iLab Africa for 6 weeks.
After two weeks,we received an email from the incubator manager to send a profile of the startup and other details. But there was one problem,since I wasn't part of the original founders of the startup and joined only for the hackathon,we couldn't agree on a few things including equity sharing and other stuff. So personally,I decided to quit the startup and go on my way.
My experience during my first ever hackathon:
- Attend and participate in challenges and hackathons,they will open to you a new world and you will learn a lot.
- Dont join any startup unless you have a formal agreement with the team or you have been present when it was founded. Ask question before you even give your time and energy. It will save from you a lot of disappointments.
- They served cold coffee and pizza at night because there was no heating equipments at the incubation lab,I think that is why i dont like pizza upto date. I still love coffee though.
