A Start-Up in50Hrs

“A Start-up in 50 Hrs? Are you kidding me?” was my response to Mitesh when he first asked me to be his “Date” for the event. After a lot of cajoling and convincing I agreed to accompany him to the event even though I wasn’t sure if its worth giving up a weekend on something which is impossible. Towards the end of this blog I am going to sheepishly admit that it is very much possible to have , in the least, a skeleton of the startup ready with few vital organs and a mini brain developed within these 50 hours.

All the way driving to the venue which was ThoughtWorks, I cursed Mitesh for taking me to a boring seminar with professionals in suits and briefcase giving long lectures on Globalizations, business opportunity, emerging markets, role of youth blah blah blah… and also for bad driving.

I enter ThoughtWorks office at 5.30pm and was a bit disoriented for first few seconds when I saw a TT Table bang in the middle of the development center(as the jargon goes) and the techies in three-Fourths dribbling a football while discussing a specific issue in their code that they were dealing with. My eyes lit up thinking about yet another opportunity for picking at Mitesh, this time for taking me to a wrong venue. To my disappointment that was not the case. Welcome to ThoughtWorks culture.

ThoughtWorks welcomes us

I entered the room where the event, in50Hrs, would commence shortly. We began with the regular introduction session which was not really that regular. Folks here were techies, Mechanical engineers, marketing professional and not to forget College goers. They were all full of ideas for the next business venture. I admit that I am neither a real techie, nor a designer nor do I have a great idea and thus was quite self conscious of my presence in the room that smelled of brilliance.

And then enters our host, mentor, facilitator and sometimes Entertainer, Vijay Anand(google him wrt Startup Center). Vijay, famously known as the Serial Entrepreneur has several start-ups to his credit and has now dedicated himself to developing a sustaining ecosystem for budding Entrepreneurs in India. I would like to quote Vijay, and any aspiring entrepreneur should probably get it tattooed on his/her body : “Fall in love with the problem, not with your solution.”

Vijay Anand

Why do startups fail? Vijay quotes his mentor, “Birds fly, fishes swim, start-ups fail… Success with startups is not a norm, it’s a miracle.” He explains that the biggest problem with the aspiring entrepreneurs is that they want to make it big in the very first attempt, not realizing that entrepreneurship is a lifelong endeavor of building a top class product that is “YOU”.

Vijay introduced us to our Mentors who would guide us with our task of creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by the end of those 50 Hours. These mentors have “been there, done that”, failed, failed better and then succeeded. Their success won’t help us in our assignment as much as their failures.

One of the mentors, Birender(ThouhtWorks)

Day1 was marked by the hustle-bustle of future entrepreneurs ready to pitch their ideas hoping to rope in techies, designers, business analyst to form a team that could help them ,develop a working prototype which will be demoed on day2. 8 of 12 pitching would be accepted based on the number of votes each pitch received from the competing pitches.

Ideas came flowing right from our favorite and most exploited area : “Carpooling”  , to the most unheard of : On the go-Cross platform Digital data transfer across different platforms, in between covering Recruitment platform, Social Marketplace, Entrepreneur consultancy platform, and the list goes on.

Voting against Ideas

The next 48 hours was marked by a high intensity “Jam sessions” where one could hear loud brain-storming sessions and markers squeaking in pain while being roughed up on the white board, coming out of the rooms allocated to each of the teams. An occasional game of Table-Tennis helped us in loosening up a bit.

I jumped into the Carpooling band-wagon as I could relate to it to a greater extent. It aches in our guts to see a lineup of vehicles, cars, to be more specific, with just one person inside, creating a havoc of the traffic. We came up with a carpool system which surpasses the existing systems leveraging on “Flexibility” for car owner as well as the ride requester. A mobile application(android) that enables both the participants to find each other in real time, picking up rides anywhere along the route without much preplanning and obligation. Also offering a convenient and safe feature for the driver based on voice recognition, to accept requests while he is driving.

Mitesh with Mentor Akash

Mitesh, being the geek, started torturing his keyboard. At times one could observe him desperately trying to detangle himself from the web of data-cables and devices. Akshay, another techie created wire frames, Atul, the idea guy, made sure every aspect of the solution was covered. Aditya, a second year college student, gave most of the business development ideas and we took to hold surveys to gain more insight to our concept.

Carpool Team (Left to Right): Aditya,Atul and Akshay

Sunday evening, we demoed our prototype and enjoyed the applause and acceptance that we received from the jurors. But more than that we got the confidence to take that next step,  to scale up an idea to a prototype to a product. I was wrong. This was one of the best weekends, with some of the best people.