****Taken from my personal blog: http://welshboymeetschile.weebly.com/the-blog
As I mentioned in the last article, this one will focus completely on what has been my favourite experience of Chile so far. I got to experience start-up culture out here first hand, and have now made some amazing contacts and friends and possible colleagues!
So let me start off by explaining to you a bit more about what actually is a Start-Up Weekend. Essentially, at the very beginning of the competition, everybody is invited up on stage to pitch a business idea whatever it may be. They state the idea, the problem it solves and what kind of people they need to help them develop it. There were about 15-20 people who pitched an idea, mine being number 7 I believe. However, what happens next is that every participant gets 2 votes, to vote on which businesses they would like to take part in. The 8 businesses with the most votes are the ones which will then be developed on during the weekend. Once people know the 8 successful ideas, they can participate in whichever team they want, providing they are the type of person that particular business requires.
Now let me tell you my experience of the beginning, which could not have gone any better! As I said, I was about the seventh person to pitch an idea. The idea was essentially based on the fact that everybody wants to learn something new, but sometimes classes can be expensive to pay for and good teachers can be hard to find, and for these reasons, a new skill gets lower and lower on someone’s list of priorities and in the majority of cases, they won’t get the chance to learn what they want. I proposed an online social-media platform which would allow people to trade skills, with no money involved. Here is the description we are currently using when asked what the business is and does so I will share it with you here:
“Would you like to learn a new skill? Perhaps learn how to play that instrument you always wanted to play, or cook that delicious dish you always order. Or do you just want to try something new?
In the past, you may have paid for countless classes which are simply too costly and not good value for money. Too much of your time is spent teaching yourself from YouTube videos or books that do not answer everything you want to know and you often end up with more questions than when you started.
With SkillSwap, you can learn a new skill in a free interactive way taught by someone who has it in their best interests to teach you!
SkillSwap is an online platform which connects people around the world to exchange their knowledge and skills. Now you can meet up with new people in your area or talk to them online to both learn and teach.
In an ideal world, everyone would find a perfect match in their region meaning two people can learn what they want from each other. However, this is not always the case and we aim to overcome this problem with our own virtual currency of stars. When you teach a class, you gain a star which you can then spend on taking a class with someone else.”
I have seen the idea done badly in the past, and thought it would be a fun thing to work on during the weekend. I wasn’t bothered about winning or losing, so much as I was with working on a difficult concept and seeing what we could create, but I am so proud with what we managed to achieve!
If you want to see the video advert which we made, download the file below as I cannot display HD videos because that requires paying subscription to Weebly, something which I can’t particularly afford right now.
So this idea wasn’t only one of the top 8, but it was the most popular idea and for this reason I won a T-Shirt! A bright-green t-shirt which makes me look like a glow-in-the-dark jelly bean! Shortly after, I was approached by 3 Chilean guys; one developer and two business strategists who would become my team, as well as Gav also from the University of Southampton who came with me to the weekend and what a team they were! We had no arguments, they all had great ideas and made a great input into the idea!
I still can’t get over the fact I was able to take control over a team of Chileans and develop the winning business of the competition. All our conversations were in Spanish, it was a completely new environment and I have never had to talk about business in Spanish so I am very proud of myself that I was able to do it. That was a great achievement itself!
So the next part of the competition is developing the idea itself. It turned out great, we created a website, an application, a functioning business model and a potential online community. Things get very stressful towards the end of the 54 hours when we have to start preparing our final pitches, especially for me when I am the person giving the final pitch.
The pitch itself made me laugh. I was the 5th to go up, and the standard of presentation was extremely high with a lot of great ideas pitched, so I had a few tough acts to follow. What surprised me was that even though I was aware that I could have done the whole presentation in English because the judges could speak it, I started doing it in Spanish digging a whole for myself. It took me 10 seconds before I even realised that I was speaking in Spanish, so that really shows how much I had been speaking in Spanish that weekend if my natural reaction to the pitch was to start speaking in Spanish. I awkwardly then had to explain how I was going to switch to English because the next part would be a bit difficult to explain in Spanish, especially given the 4 time limit.
To see my pitch, feel free to watch the video below:
After the pitches, on a brief toilet break the chief director of the organisation which put on the event asked me for my email so we could keep in contact so he could get me involved in the start-up community in Chile as he was really impressed by me. As I mentioned in the last article, I am still waiting to see how this pans out.
When we returned for the results, I did not expect to win, especially given the standard of the ideas and presentations. They announced who would come 3rd, and when my team name wasn’t called I thought to myself that there was no chance we were going to win. But to my surprise, I was completely wrong. We got invited up onto the stage as the winners! The best part was the fact that as well as a goody bag of random Yelp propaganda, as the founder of the team, I won an awesome new laptop!
Here’s a picture of us celebrating our victory with our brand new and spectacular Yelp sponsored sunglasses. I may as well caption it saying “This picture was brought to you by Yelp!” They gave us lip-balm and stickers too. We were completely spoilt rotten! Oh, and I didn’t even mention the Yelp! badge that we got too!
When we returned for the results, I did not expect to win, especially given the standard of the ideas and presentations. They announced who would come 3rd, and when my team name wasn’t called I thought to myself that there was no chance we were going to win. But to my surprise, I was completely wrong. We got invited up onto the stage as the winners! The best part was the fact that as well as a goody bag of random Yelp propaganda, as the founder of the team, I won an awesome new laptop!
Here’s a picture of us celebrating our victory with our brand new and spectacular Yelp sponsored sunglasses. I may as well caption it saying “This picture was brought to you by Yelp!” They gave us lip-balm and stickers too. We were completely spoilt rotten! Oh, and I didn’t even mention the Yelp! badge that we got too!
Besides pride, a bunch of crap from Yelp! and of course my brand new laptop, there was another worthwhile prize. This was qualifying for the next round of the competition, the Global Start-Up Battle! This is a competition which brings together the winning teams of start-up weekends from around the world. Over 250 cities host the event, which means we are now up against some amazing global teams, but we are in it to win it!
The next stage of the competition is primarily based on votes that we get on our page on the Global Start-Up Battle website. This will mean that my whole team will be running a campaign to get ourselves as many votes as possible by getting published in newspapers, using our networks, and asking friends to make the business known to their networks and so on. The name SkillSwap will be all over the world soon enough.
I am so proud with what I have achieved. It is an awesome story, a welsh boy representing his country in Chile at a Start-Up competition in a team of three Chileans and another British person, winning and qualifying for a very prestigious global competition. This means that I am now representing Wales and also the University of Southampton on a global scale, it’s incredible!
The incentive for this competition is not solely this representation, but the prizes. The prizes are fantastic. We could potentially win the opportunity to launch our business in a premier location in Silicon Valley, where companies like Google and Facebook have their headquarters; tickets and lodging for the Global Enterprise Conference in Milan; a trip to New York for a media tour of Nasdaq; a trip to San Francisco; one-on-one mentorship from several, well established and successful entrepreneurs; $20,000 in General Assembly courses and so much more!
I hope you will all be able to help me out in the coming weeks by generating as much interest in the business as you possibly can. This is like a dream come true!
This is it for this article, I hope you have enjoyed hearing about the experience and what I’m going through right now as much as I have enjoyed living it! Until next time, I bid you adieu!
