This past weekend the first (I hope of many) Startup Weekend Monterrey took place, an event I’ve been organizing for the last 2 months as part of with a great “ninja” team.
As a former participant in the Startup Weekend events in Mexico City and Guadalajara, it was very interesting to me to see the event with the detachment and global view of an organizer. So, I’ll be posting some of the random thoughts I had.
Canvas time
From what I’ve seen most teams spent almost all Saturday working on their Business Canvas. I guess the fact that we had printed canvases waiting for them on their work desks has something to do with it, I hope it wasn’t a bad idea. The downside was that only few got to do some “get out of the building” style customer development. And I think about half of the teams didn’t really get to validate their hypothesis at all.
Still lost on Sunday morning
There were teams that still struggled to find a model that could work on Sunday morning, with only a few hours to go until the final presentation. It always happens, I guess. It amazes me that they always seem to find a way and get the presentation done on time.
Design
I found it weird that a couple of teams decided to concentrate on great design and worry later about the business model. In the end they did come up with “the numbers” but I doubt they got to validate their value proposition with real potential clients. And in this type of events the judges will probably question your business, not the design or implementation, sorry.
Non profit? You still need the business model and customer development
There were 2 projects that declared themselves as “non-profit” or at least “not in it for the money”. What are they doing in an event that is focused on creating businesses? It turns out they need to validate their hypothesis about client needs just as a for-profit business. And, more importantly, they need to be scalable with few available resources, an even more difficult task in their case.
Community
One thing we knew when we started was that there was no organized startupper community in Monterrey that we could contact and spread the word. In fact one of the reasons we organized the event was to get this kind of people together. I hope I’m not wrong, but I think that this is the greatest success of the Startup Weekend Monterrey: entrepreneurs now know they are not alone, they are in contact, they want to do meet-ups and other events and to take it to the next level.
Monterrey pride
Unfortunately, Monterrey is going through some rough times. The drug-related violence of the last couple of years has made it a dangerous place to live. Just 2 weeks prior to our event, an attack on a casino resulted in 52 deaths and left the city and the whole Mexico in shock. That’s why I think there was a parallel agenda in our event. This was part of the citizens’ response. You could feel that all the participants at Startup Weekend Monterrey were proud to show that good things are being done here, that there are still a lot of people here that build instead of destroying. Once again in my time in Mexico, these people surprised me with their resilience. I felt humbled and proud to be part of it.
