Auckland Startup Weekend

I attended Auckland Startup Weekend (AKLSW) last weekend (1 – 3 April 2011) and it was amazing. This is my experience of the weekend.

I started looking around at the various startup weekends run in the US and thought that would it would be great to attend one. The two which seem to have the most traction in the US are:

Startup weekend http://startupweekend.org/ and

Founder labs http://www.founderlabs.org/

Venture capitalist and Blogger Fred Wilson wrote this about them:

Two of my favorite pre-accelerator programs are Startup Weekend and Founder Labs. In these programs you can show up with an idea, without a team, a plan, and much of anything else. They help you put a team together, develop the idea, and get going. Startup Weekend does it in a weekend. Their approach is to “share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups in 54 hours.” Founder Labs does it over 5.5 weeks, nights and weekends. Their approach is “keep your job for now, build a team and launch a prototype.” If you have an idea but not much else and need help, these programs are for you.

I couldn’t agree more with Fred. I saw the startup weekend website, and then saw they were running one in Auckland and was keen to head along.

The first obstacle, you have to clear your schedule for the whole weekend, from Friday at 6pm, to Sunday night. That was quite a challenge as I tend to plan my life ahead of time.

Then I had to come up with an idea to pitch. I asked Sarah (my wife) what she thought was a good idea. She wanted a service which allowed her to see what the locals in Europe do/eat/hang out so that when we visit we can hit these places instead of the touristy places. So I pitched an idea called 9locals.com inspired by Max Levchin’s tweet where he asked:

Question for Kiwis — please suggest a cool, low-key, not (too) touristy dinner spot in Queenstown. Thx!

I thought the idea was great. You could also get recommendations like what does Gordon Ramsay think are the best places to eat in the UK ect. When I did the pitch, I said that I would make it my mission to get Max to write a review of where ever it was he ate as the first one for our new site.

My idea made it into the final 10, but when it came to picking teams to develop the idea further, we only had three people, and we were standing right next to Jordan and his Taxi idea, so once it was clear no one else thought my idea was as amazing as I did, I jumped ship to join up with the taxi team.

Sorry Max, it would have been fun to see if I could have got you to write a 2 minute review for us.

So it turns out that I had attended Jordan’s wedding only a few weeks prior as I knew his wife (only in New Zealand).

The rest of our team seemed cool also, and we had a good mix of all of the skills required to hit it out of the park, although we ended up with a large team of 10 people.

Our initial idea was a white label taxi booking solution which would be sold to a NZ taxi company. The idea was basically that you would program your home address into the GPS, it would know your current address (via GPS) and you would press a big button that ordered you a taxi. It would go to the taxi company’s dispatch system, and they would locate the nearest taxi to you.

Immediately several members of our team had reservations that the idea wasn’t big enough. Yes we could sell it to a taxi company for $100k, but the idea was really quite average. We also did some research which showed that there was already 100 other apps out there which did the exact same thing. More worries within the group. Then the idea was pitched that we could make a service called blackmarkettaxis.com where anyone could be a taxi driver. There was a lot of heated debating backwards and forwards and we left on Friday night without any real idea on where we would go with the idea (even thought the app was started being built, and the back end was also being developed).

When we all met up on Saturday morning there seemed to be two groups within our group. One wanted to stick with the original idea, the other group wanted to go the blackmarket route. More debating and I thought we needed to make a decision one way or the other, or we would end up debating for the whole weekend (as it seems some other teams did) and not actually produce anything. The vote came in 5 – 4 in favour of the black market option and everyone got in behind that idea.

The blackmarket idea was that we would be the airbnb.com of taxis connecting people who wanted a ride, with people who had rides to give.

The team also settled on the name taxisurfer.com even though some members of the team didn’t love the name, we made decisions quickly so we could move on to the real work, making a working prototype and settling on a business plan. After meeting with several members of the team who gave us great ideas and several lawyers who were also mentors we decided to find a middle ground between the blackmarket idea and the white label service.

What we agreed was that there would be a driver app and a customer app. The driver using the service would either register as a metered taxi or an unmetered taxi. If the user requested a metered taxi they could be assured that the taxi was from a legit taxi service because no one would put a meter in their taxi for kicks.

The user interface would allow users to choose whether they wanted a metered or unmetered taxi, and eventually also whether they wanted a van, female driver or taxi from a specific company. Users would also be able to rate taxi drivers and taxi drivers would rate users. Ordering a taxi via taxisurfer would also be very safe because you would know who picked you up and their feedback from other users. You could contact the driver directly if you left your property in their car to get it back.

We reasoned that if you would let a random stranger come and stay in your house, surely you would get a lift from a stranger because it’s less intrusive than having someone in your house.

The business model started to take shape, we settled on a $1 per ride charge to the taxi driver. Work continued through the night on Saturday night. By the time everyone left on Saturday we had: a twitter account setup, a facebook page, a website up, a logo designed, a half finished presentation, a working client app, a half completed driver app, and a half done database. The die was set. It was now too late to make any changes to our business model.

On Sunday morning everyone arrived early and knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing and by lunch time we had our first run through on the presentation with a working app. Several more presentation practices followed and finally it was time to present.

The one part of the presentation which I was most worried about was that we would have to describe a problem. Is there a problem with how you currently book a taxi? We were a little worried because there isn’t a real problem with ordering a taxi, but one of our team members came up with this great line:

When I was young, there wasn’t really a problem with black and white television. But then colour TV came along…

This was a genius way to phrase our problem. To order a taxi now, you have to leave the bar call the company, go back into the bar, wait for the taxi to arrive, argue with someone else as to whose taxi it was, the get a ride home.

Our solution was, pull out your smart phone, press the big button, a minute or so later it would tell you how long until the taxi arrived, put your phone away, the app would alert you when the taxi driver was there. No arguing over whose taxi it was because you have an order confirmation number to match against the drivers number.

During the presentation everyone loved the app demo and the presentation was 4.58 long, perfect timing, 2 seconds to spare.

There were some good questions from the judges about the legality, the scalability and the ability to get traction. We answered them all very well.

When the awards were announced, our idea came out on top, and we won first place.

My thoughts about the overall weekend:

I initially went to meet like minded people and this went WAY better than I expected. The quality of the people at AKLSW was top notch, the mentors were excellent and accessible and the organiser Jason did a great job. I met so many great people that I decided to setup a linked in Group to connect with them, and I’m looking forwards to developing relationships with them over the next few months. New Zealand is a small place, and having a group of like minded people together for an event like this is a great achievement.

All in all, the weekend was great, and highly recommended to all.

Chris