With three hours left, Shopperholly scrambles to finish their prototype and prepare their presentation. Photo: Startup Weekend Singapore 2012
I dropped by at Startup Weekend Singapore on Sunday for the first time, not knowing what to expect.
But I’m glad to report that my experience was positive. For those who are new to the startup scene, Startup Weekend is a global series of events that brings random people together to develop a startup idea into a minimum viable product within 54 hours.
The event ends with a scintillating (or discombobulating) series of pitches, where the teams get feedback from a panel consisting of investors and established entrepreneurs.
One of the aims of Startup Weekend is to introduce potential entrepreneurs to what it’s like to actually work in a startup environment. The knife-sharp and spot-on critiques from the panel, as well as the intense 54 hours preceding it, certainly did that.
Overall, there were some awesome, potentially profitable ideas.
Team Snapsell won the top prize for a mobile app that allows users to buy and sell stuff on an online marketplace, kind of like a mobile-optimized, more efficient replacement of ClubSnap or Hardwarezone forums.
The main prize consists of an Elevator Pitch at season two of Angel’s Gate, a scholarship to Founder Institute Singapore, subject to a successful interview, validation space at incubator space Blk 71, and four conference tickets to Echelon, an annual startup conference in Singapore.
Starcall was the runner-up with their idea of a one-to-one video call website with celebrities, where proceeds will go to charity. The second runner-up was Mystery Shopper, a mobile platform that gives retail businesses an easy way to find and evaluate mystery shoppers.
I really like Mystery Shopper. Their presentation was polished, and they seem to really know the industry well. Their business model is interesting: They aim to lower the cost of acquiring and hiring mystery shoppers, potentially disrupting the industry and making some people very angry.
Their team looks solid too, consisting of some experienced entrepreneurs, technical, and design people.
Another team that has potential, but didn’t win, is Shopperholly. They are designing a Flipboard for blogshops, combined with an in-app transaction feature. Their front-end is beautifully designed, and they’ve even managed to get one prominent Singapore blogshop to feature their items on the iPad app.
While the idea is solid and the revenue model clear, their problem, as the panel rightly pointed out, is scalability. Talking to individual blogshops one-by-one takes a lot of time and effort, not to mention expanding to the region. What they need is a self-service platform for bloggers to get their items onto the app.
Other ideas that I think could take off include TietheKnot, a Pinterest for weddings, and YouBetIWill, an app that helps you set and achieve your goals through peer motivation.
While the judges pointed out that goal-setting apps have largely failed, this presents an opportunity for YouBetIWill to be the first to succeed and get it right.
These are some great ideas at Startup Weekend, sure, but we don’t know how many of them will actually come to fruition and become real startups. An organizer pointed out that the follow-through rate for participants is around five percent globally.
If that holds here, we can expect at least four startups (out of 80 initial participants) to form out of this event. That’s an encouraging sign, and I’m glad Meng Weng Wong of JFDI.Asia is working hard to organize some follow-up events to encourage these teams to continue with their ideas.
Another but is that I think we need more truly visionary and groundbreaking ideas, something that Jacky Yap from e27 mentioned as well.
We need more people like Nicholas Leong, a Singaporean who scooted to Kenya in search of an African Lance Armstrong. We need folks like Nick D’Aloisio as well, whose summarization technology could potentially change how information is presented on the Internet.
Lack of talent wasn’t an issue — the number of PhD holders on Mystery Shopper is scary — but we need more people to get cracking on global problems rather than personal ones — and communicate their solutions well.
Artificial Intelligence, augmented reality, and NFC are areas that I think could become huge in a few years, and as risky as it is to venture into technology that hasn’t quite matured, the results are much higher too.
I’d love to see more teams venture into the Wild West of technology.
Maybe at the next Startup Weekend Singapore.
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