Last May I participated in the Startup Weekend Ottawa. What a rush!
Picture this:
One venue (Thanks Shopify) full of Business minded people, Developers, Designers and Experienced Entrepreneurs with the purpose of starting something new. A company, an Idea or new friendships during the span of the weekend.
We started on Friday evening with some networking and ice breaker activities. Then it was pitching time!
Everyone who had an idea waited to take the stage and share it with the audience. After all the ideas were heard it was time to vote and choose the most popular ones.
The ideas with more votes assembled teams around them and then it was time to go prototype, design and validate the ideas.
Saturday passed very quickly for me. Coding and designing the interface for Your Book Buddy took most of my time while interacting with the business side and trying to gather product validation from wherever possible.
Also on Saturday mentors and sponsors were around providing advice and scope to the projects. It’s then when you get a good feeling if your idea has wheels or if its time for a spin off.
Sunday arrived so fast and with it all the teams were getting ready for their presentations. The competition was hard as most of the teams had very good ideas and a working prototype up and running. We showed ours during the five minutes presentation.
After all the teams presented it was up to the judges to choose the winners.
Your Book Buddy
We offer a service of connecting children with their distant loved ones. We allow the adult and child to select a book and the adult can then read it to them online via online video chat. Both the adult and the child will be able to see the book and each other! This allows the adult to share an experience with a child that would otherwise only have been possible in person.
All our effort paid off and we scored second place. The honours were for team Vidrack (A site used to solicit client video testimonials).
In a nutshell it was fun, it was worth it and yes I would do it again!
Startup Weekend 3
