By Matt Smith
Last weekend I attended an amazing event called Startup Weekend. What is Startup Weekend you may ask? It is a microcosm of entrepreneurship and starting a company in a weekend. On Friday night you hear business idea pitches. From there you join teams around the ideas and start building.
This may sound like fun but the reality is that it was stressful, challenging, and draining both physically and emotionally. First off, as a semi experienced tech entrepreneur I have a certain understanding of how to build tech products and businesses. One element that new tech entrepreneurs don’t understand is that if you can’t sell or build you can’t do much. The epitome of this terrible twosome is Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Jobs sold and Woz built.
So to all the aspiring tech entrepreneurs learn to sell or learn to build.
The emotions in my team ran pretty high because the non-builders and sellers could only talk and quickly began doubting the concept we had decided on the night before. Once again this is typical when starting a company. Initially you are so excited about the concept but when you start building, the excitement wears off because you realize building a company is hard!
But with only 48 hours to get the company off the ground the time to doubt the concept had come and gone. We ran some additional tests using landing pages and google ad words which calmed some of the doubts.
By Sunday night I had to pitch and was super tired. I rocked the pitch but we did not win, sadly.
Overall, it was a fun experience that I would definitely do again. I recommend Startup Weekend to any budding entrepreneurs. It is true learning experience. Think of it as entrepreneurial bootcamp.
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