At the first Startup Weekend I attended I only talked to about 4 people before the pitches started. Coincidence or not – my idea got only 4 votes. At the next one I tried to meet as much people as possible. The idea that I pitched was one of the top voted ones. See the pattern there?

I’m a developer at heart. I prefer interacting with software instead of people. I am “socially challenged”. I did learn a few tips and tricks that helped me overcome it though. Of course, they apply to any kind of networking, not just Startup Weekend events.

1. Don’t sit down

If you sit down (at a table for example) you’ll only talk to your neighbours. You’ll also be less accessible to other people. You don’t want that.

Sitting down makes you look inaccessible

2. Move

“The most interesting man in the room”™ is on the other side. Move if you want to meet him.

3. Meet and go

You have a limited time and a lot of people to meet. Don’t get bogged down in long conversations. If there are common interests you can always schedule a meeting afterwards.

4. Beware of tentacles

Some people WILL try to have long conversations. Find a way to bring closure.

5. Business cards are a must

You’ll want to leave your contact data. Apps like Bump are nice, but if the other person doesn’t have it, you can miss an opportunity. Also, exchanging business cards is a nice way to finish the conversation and move along.

6. Don’t be comfortable

It is amazing how fast you can create a comfort zone with some people you’ve just met. If you’re feeling comfortable, you’re doing it wrong.

7. Pitch practice!

There is no rule stating that you cannot practice your pitch before presenting it in the Pitch Fire at Startup Weekend events. Just imagine: you meet 30 people – you can practice your pitch 30 times! You can see what works and what doesn’t. And you’ll have it rehearsed enough so when you pitch to everyone it will flow naturally and within the time constraints.

Do you have any other tips & tricks that you use when networking?

The whole crew

The event was the biggest and had one of the best organization of the 7 Startup Weekends I attended so far. There seems to be a trend – as the lean startup community grows in Mexico, every Startup Weekend event is better than the last, in organization, the quality of the pitched ideas and their execution.

The thing that impressed me most was the drive the participants had – there was an electrical failure on Friday night when everyone was just getting started, but they just kept working as if nothing happened. KUDOS!

Working in the dark

Venue

The Universidad de Morelia was a great host to the event. They had a big sports hall converted – half auditorium and half work spaces. There even was a camping area set up in one class room, complete with matresses for the hardcore participants.
The cherry on top was the mobile TV studio that transmitted interviews with participants and mentors all the weekend.
Talking about the mentors, the organizing team managed to get together lots of big names and experienced people – it will definetly be hard to top that in the next events.

First design concepts

My take on some of the projects:

CityME and Aprende Jugando

These 2 projects were both focused on improving the way and the values children learn while playing. It is a comendable objective and they deserve congratulations for that. I feel that they could have used more customer validation and more work on their business model – the fact that you promote good intentions or that you are non-profit doesn’t mean people will use your product. You need to do your homework just as any for-profit startup.

Mybeer

A service for delivering customized beer to beer enthusiasts. Has a lot in common with Brauers, one of the projects presented in Startup Weekend Monterrey last year. The fact that they need big orders in order to be profitable makes me think they should have looked at different client segments, like events or marketing departments.

Testing ideas

BookRecycle

Another retake on an idea presented at the Monterrey event last year, Unibooks – solve the need of buying / selling school books by students. Unlike Unibooks, that actually won SWMTY, the BookRecycle took a different approach – renting books, basicaly acting as an online library. The business model in this case didn’t convince the judges though.

Vigia

In a country that suffered several big earthquakes in the last months and has a volcano on the brink of erupting, Vigia proposed an warning system for your friends and family. If an earthquake is detected, you would receive a warning, giving you precious seconds to react. The part I found most useful is the posibility to send out your location if you are trapped.

Radar DW

Really a design studio from Guadalajara, these guys chose to work together on their studio idea. The results were not great – they presented a web comic idea ment to boost their studio’s reputation, but there was no startup idea and the jury penalized them for that. I hope they will attend another Startup Weekend event and work in different teams in order to really have a great learning experience and take full advantage of the event.

The judges

Soundbites

Probably the geekiest idea presented, Soundbites is a desktop application that constantly analyzes the audio output of your computer and builds a list of the music tracks it recognizes. Great if you’re wondering what song is on the background of a youtube video you’re playing. Although I doubt this is a feature people are craving for, the prototype execution was impressive and they even managed to sell several licences during the weekend.

Post o’clock

Post o’clock is about helping the small retail business owner decide on what merchandise to bring in, by running customer surveys in a targeted community. What impressed me is that they really found a big pain. A potential customer drove from a city 100km away on Saturday night at 10 PM and talked with the team until 2 AM! They also got 2 letters of intent signed by customers willing to buy their service. They need to work on the scalability of their product, though.

Guerra X votos

The elections are coming in Mexico and a game picking up on political rivalries is a recipe for success. Looking forward to see the finished product. Congratulations for winning second place, they were really close of the first prize.

Guerra X Votos taking shape

Celebrimeet

Want to dine with your favorite celebrity? Now you can! The Celebrimeet team managed to get the endorsement of 2 celebrities and have a business model where most of the money collected from tickets goes to charity – a win-win! I hope they continue working on the project – there are a lot of posibilities to explore, like how to decide who wins the date.
Congratulations on winning the first prize!

Celebrimeet team

My next facilitating job at a Startup Weekend event is on May 18th-20th in Monterrey, where I’m also part of the organizing team. It will be hard to top the event in Morelia, but we’ll sure try to make it even better!

Don’t sell

You want honest feedback and information. You won’t get it if the person in front of you is trying to determine whether he or she needs your product.

In fact, don’t even tell them your idea (yet)

You don’t want bias in their replies. And they will be biased if they know your idea, consciously or unconsciously applying it to their case.

Ask open-ended questions

Don’t do a survey. You have access to a real person – find out his or hers experiences and feelings, that will give you way more information than some preset answers.

Listen

If you spend a lot of time talking, you’re doing it wrong. Let your potential customer speak, and look for the things that get him or her excited or annoyed. Chances are that those things are very important for your product.

Dig deeper

Don’t stick to a script of questions. If you find a pain point, try to find more about what causes it and what they are doing to solve it now.

Look for early adopters

If you find someone who feels the pain so much that is experimenting with workarounds to fix it, then you might be looking at an early adopter for your product. That’s priceless.

Bonus: how to get people to agree to an interview

Tell them you want their OPINION or ADVICE

Most people like to give advice and be seen as experts in their field. It tickles their pride and it’s not a lie – you actually want their opinion.

Buy them a coffee or offer a gift card

If you meet in a coffee shop, it is only logical you’ll buy the coffee. If you meet using Skype, a gift card works better. Don’t force it though, some people might feel offended if you insist.

Make it clear it will not be more than 15 minutes

Time is precious, a short meeting is easier to schedule.

Make it clear you will not try to sell them something

And respect that promise.

When describing the product, be clear on what it does and who should use it. Don’t leave me guessing what your product does and if it applies to me.

For the selling part, be creative. How would you capture the interest of a person that fits your client profile using just a few words? Stay away from generic taglines like “the best X in the market”. Make me react, make me click.

Why?

Because you have less than a second to impress a potential client arriving at your landing page.

Because that’s somehing you can fit in a Google or Facebook ad. You’ll want that.

Don’t just take my word for it

Here are a few quick examples of landing pages, just to get you inspired.

LayerVault describes clearly what it does (version control) and who should use it (designers) in 5 words. The tagline could use more visibility, but it does the job of getting you interested, if you are a designer working in a team.

LayerVault

MixPanel does it the other way around: sells in 6 words and describes the product in 11 words.

MixPanel

WePay is even more concise – sell in 5 and describe in 7.

WePay.com

Heroku takes it even further – describe in 3 words and sell in 5. Note that the text might be not understandable for all, but it is clear for the target audience.

Heroku

Airbnb describes the product in a different way, by using the need they are solving. Also note the numbers used in the tagline, a strong sell point.

airbnb.com

Bonus: How to come up with your 6 / 12

Have everyone in the team write one or several 6 / 12 combinations on their own. You’ll get more great ideas this way that brainstorming together.

Then, put all the ideas on a wall and start debating and mixing them. Repeat as necessary.

Got your 6 / 12 or your landing page? Feel free to post them here in the comments section.

Gabriela Enrigue mentoring in SW Aguascalientes

1. Listen

Not all the things the mentors say to you are to your liking. But getting into a debate will not help you. Listen and take notes.

2. Look for actionable advice

Is he/she telling you to do more customer development? Or to release a prototype ASAP? To investigate your competition? You should leave with a task list.

3. Be honest

Answer the questions honestly and to the point. You have nothing to gain if you try to look smart by dodging the question.

4. Don’t sell

The mentor is not your client. So why would you try to sell your product to him or her? Don’t look for validation of your idea with your mentor. You have your (potential) customers for that.

Corollary: the mentor might not be convinced by your product, but then again, he is not your client!

5. Take note of the questions

If you hear a question like “How many potential clients have you talked to?” for the n-th time, then maybe you should answer that question to yourself before meeting with the mentor. Anticipate common questions and save time for yourself and your mentor by doing your homework.

6. Take it with a grain of salt

Nobody know everything and nobody can predict the future. Mentors can be wrong from time to time. And if you talk with various mentors, you’ll find they contradict each other. It’s normal.

7. Don’t pivot on mentor feedback alone

I cringe when I hear something like “We talked with the mentor and decided to pivot our product”. It’s as bad as “The team talked (for hours) and decided to pivot”. If you pivot, you have to do it based on the things you learned about your clients. You learn by doing customer development, market research, analysis of your metrics, etc. and not by talking to mentors. For more anti-pivot patterns, check this funny article by Tristan Kromer.

"Assisted Blind Pivot" by Tristan Kromer

The amazing crew

The local organizing team did a great job preparing and spreading the word about the event. It was the first time I got to see banners and billboards about Startup Weekend spread all over the city.

The University of Aguascalientes provided a very appropriate venue for the event. The only drawback was that the university policy didn’t allow us to spend the nights on the campus. Sad to see that the security situation in Mexico affects us in so many ways. Even so, several teams spent the nights working at one of their member’s home. And at 7:30 AM there were already about 15 people working hard at the campus.

There were almost 100 participants, most of them students or recently graduated. It was very interesting in this context to see 2 elderly participants, a successful business man and a taxi driver (!) looking for to improve the service he and his colleagues are providing. So nice to see that the entrepreneur spirit has no boundaries.

Photoshoot with a team of rockstars

About 60 ideas were pitched and then the voting started. There were a handful of really popular ideas that got 20+ and 30+ votes. The weird part was that the rest of the ideas got far less or zero votes so we had to select the 16 ideas with 5 votes or more. The problem carried on to the team forming – there were several teams that could not find programmers or designers and some teams had 7 to 10 people. In the end 13 teams were formed.

The challenge most of the teams fought with was Customer Development. Although all the mentors stressed the importance of talking and listening to your potential clients, there were several “blind pivots” where the teams would discuss and discuss between them and then come up with a new idea without any input from their clients. I’ll have to put more emphasis on this in the initial presentation for the next Startup Weekend and also provide guidance on how to conduct the interviews with the potential customers. (Hint: don’t sell, do listen)

Evaluating the projects

Wnt2know

The Wnt2Know team managed to find a potential client “screaming” with pain. It was a restaurant chain owner fed up with the complaints about bad service he receives from his clients. They even managed to get a letter of intent signed by him, promising to buy their service. So they nailed the pain, yay! The solution they proposed (basically a traditional consulting service with a suspiciously low price) lacked innovation and scalability.

Forgivers

I loved the initial pitch of Forgivers: “We all have pissed off a loved one in the past. Forgivers lets you post yourself doing something crazy online and then have people vote on whether you should be forgiven or not”. The team did a great job in general and dodged a twist towards a very complicated business model at one point. I hope they’ll keep on working on the project – it has potential.

Ready for the afterparty

MiBusOnline

With a team of 9 or 10 persons, I was worried that the MiBusOnline team would suffer as most teams of that size do – infinite discussions and slow progress. A big kudos for the way they managed their team work! Their idea: to have a service letting people know the estimated time of arrival of the next bus. Their twist: doing it by using crowd data instead of partnering with the bus lines. Scalability FTW!

When they came to me asking about SMS and special phone numbers, I contacted them with another entrepreneur from Guadalajara that has a startup doing just that. I was amazed when they told me 6 hours later that they were already integrating with his system!

Overall, the MiBusOnline was the best work I’ve seen in the 6 Startup Weekend events I took part in so far. They rode the buses, put up signs in the bus stations and got people to use their service. All that topped with great design, working software and a nice final presentation.

The MiBusOnline team

To all planning to attend one of the next Startup Weekends in Mexico (Morelia, Mexico City and Monterrey):

The bar has been raised! Do you accept the challenge?

Prizes. The prizes in Startup Weekend events are not that appealing – you don’t get any material trophy, just fame & glory and something to help you continue with your startup.

Teams. In Startup Weekend events the teams get formed on the fly, with people that just met a few minutes ago. If you are in it for the win, this doesn’t work. You’ll want to have a well formed team that already knows how to work together.

Ideas. As mentioned in this blog post (“A bolder idea?” part), you’ll want to know more about the viability of the idea you’ll be working on so you’ll choose a project with more chances of success. A 100 persons debate on the market share or competition (things that the teams will do anyway) for all the 40-70 presented ideas would take all night and probably become unmanageable.

Collaboration. Different teams collaborating or helping each other is a common sight in Startup Weekend events. If the focus is on the competition, this would not happen – if you’re interested in winning there is no point in wasting time helping a rival team.

The fact that there is a winner and that there are prizes can be misleading to the participants in a Startup Weekend. The real value you get is the experience (from the “elevator pitch” all the way to the feedback received from the jury) and the networking. Everybody wins that!

I still think teams that do an exceptional job in one or all of the areas should be congratulated by the jury and get their “fame & glory”. Have perks for the teams to help them build their startup further.

Just don’t make it about the competition – that is another type of event, with a different dynamic and interaction between the participants.

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.

(Part 1 here)

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.

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.

Most pitched ideas don’t seem so great at first

I’ve noticed that in the other events I took part too, but I blamed the fact that I was too concentrated on how to make my sale pitch and didn’t give them enough of my attention. Anyway, this makes the final presentations even more amazing, seeing what a good team can do with one of those ideas I thought was unclear or generic or impossible. I’ve learned my lesson to keep an open mind, and I realized I even came to expect the “miracle transformations” during the weekend.

Most people are so concentrated on pitching their idea that they are oblivious to everything else

We had a simple routine, where after pitching the person would go to the back of the stage and in order to write their idea on the panels used later for voting. It was funny to see one guy forgetting to do that, people making signs to redirect him, and then the next and the next, most of them failing to register what happened before their turn while waiting in line.

Put passion in your presentation

I’m  still working on this for myself. Also, please don’t use enterprise sounding long words, not with this crowd. Keep it real.

Teams form fast

After the voting, I was surprised to see how fast teams formed, in spite of the fact that, due to the architecture of the place, the team leaders were kind of spread and not visible. Before I knew it, the work areas were full and the teams already started to work.

“Deserters” happen

I really didn’t notice this in the events I took part as a participant, but apparently it happens all the time. A few people left because they wanted to work only on their idea. It made me sad to see among them a couple of my friends. Some had advances on their project and didn’t want to waste time working on another idea. That brings me to the next point:

New idea vs. project already on the way

Startup Weekend is about Lean Startupping, about doing customer development, business model generation – basically being able to change and adapt your idea. If you have a partial developed product, you’ve lost a good deal of your flexibility, the things you can change without throwing your past work away are limited. It’s way more difficult to get people to join your project because they would feel like they’re missing out on that experience and also not be able to assume ownership of the idea.

(part 2)

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partial class Job : IGuidID
{
	public class JobMetadata
	{
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	}
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When using ASP.NET MVC’s ModelState.IsValid and the default MVC validation, everything goes as expected – the [Required] attribute is respected and you get the appropriate validation error message.

Now, if you need to run the validation manually, using Validator.[Try]ValidateObject(…), you’re in for a nasty surprise: the validation passes, ignoring your attributes.
After a lot of searching, I finally narrowed it down to MetadataType, got the right search terms and found the answer on Stack Overflow (of course): you need to manually register the MetadataType provider.

static Job()
{
	TypeDescriptor.AddProviderTransparent(
			new AssociatedMetadataTypeTypeDescriptionProvider(typeof(Job), typeof(JobMetadata)), typeof(Job));
}

Here is the link for the full answer.