Why I think we won AKLSW…
It seems that people were interested in the inner workings of the Taxisurfer team from AKLSW after writing this post. So I’d like to talk more about that.
This post isn’t meant to be arrogant, although I’m sure some will see it that way, but I’d like to talk about why Taxisurfer managed to beat out the competition. I think there are some lessons for all businesses.
1. It’s all about the team
Our team was very lucky to end up with a great mix of people. We had a designer, two iphone developers (including one of the best in NZ), two database guys, two web guys and three business guys. For what we were trying to achieve, this was the perfect balance.
2. You could explain our concept in one sentence
Push one button on your iphone and the taxi will arrive at your location.
That’s all Jordan needed to say and everyone in the group knew what we were building. The idea was specific enough so that the right people could start building it straight away. The core of the idea never changed during the weekend, although all kinds of things around it changed.
Because the idea never changed we started building the tech on Friday night and it all helped us gain momentum during the weekend.
3. Pivot / Being open to change
Apart from the key idea, everything else was up for debate:
The business model – do you white label sell to taxi companies in NZ or overseas? do you work with registered taxi’s only? do you go black market only? Do you include a payment method through the app? or do taxi’s collect the money directly? do you charge a percentage of the fare or flagfall? or have a fixed cost per booking? Do you include other services such as airport transfers? or stick with only taxis? what is the MVP?
The design of the app: should there be one app or two? what platforms do you design for? How does the app work? should the app show where the driver is and an estimated time of arrival? Do the jobs go out to all taxi drivers or only those within a certain radius? Do you supply the address of the bookee? or supply it only once they want the job?
You can see how this works. The marketing, overall vision, and technology also were areas of debate.
Our team worked together cohesively and made decisions quickly after a robust debate. As I mentioned the team voted 5 – 4 to go for the anyone can be a taxi option, but once the decision was made everyone moved on quickly to what they were supposed to be doing to execute the teams wishes. No one came back and questioned that decision once it was made.
4. We practiced our presentation at least 10 times and overprepared
Andy and Jordan hit it out of the park with the presentation.
But it was no accident that the presentation was that good. We actually did our first presentation practice on Saturday night with a really rough slide deck. Whilst our team was building the tech on Saturday two Andy’s and I (there were three Andrews on our team) were writing slides, debating with mentors and firming up our business model. By 5pm on Saturday our first slide deck was completed with the talking points all mapped out. We had our first presentation practice and used the outcome of this to amend the slides a couple of times. What’s on your slides and what you say don’t have to be the same thing. In the beginning we had exactly what we were saying on the slides, but bit by bit changed the slides to become more polished.
This also allowed us to get the timing right. 5 minutes isn’t a long time, so what you don’t say is as important as what you do. I think the first run through ran about 5 minutes with out the 60 second demo, so we had to decide what to cut from there.
I think my feedback to Andy after each of the 9 practice runs was that he needed to embellish the problem because an iterative improvement to booking a taxi isn’t a 10x improvement on the current system. But the ease of use and the simplicity and added benefits together might be a 10x improvement. You can’t sell someone on how great our new solution is if there aren’t problems with the current solution. In our case the problems were:
To order a taxi you have to leave the bar, call the cab company, wait on hold, order, wait for taxi to arrive, you don’t know when the taxi has arrived, taxi gets grumpy waiting, someone else steals your cab. Repeat process. By having a unique booking number no one else could steal your cab. We also trumpeted the added security of knowing exactly who was picking you up, and being able to contact them should you leave stuff in their cab.
We also massively over prepared for the presentation. We had at least 5 slides which weren’t used in the actual presentation, but were ready for a question. One great example of this was a budget. Should the judges ask how much money we wanted to raise and what we would spend it on, we had prepared a slide showing a $100k budget and how we would spend it.
I suggested this to Andy as this is really important, what’s important is to show that you have thought of it, not necessarily that the budget is 100% accurate. We also had slides on our build architecture and other such boring things.
5. We were first off the bat in terms of marketing
By mid day Saturday we also had setup a twitter account a website and a Facebook account.
We were tweeting out all manner of things to anyone who would listen. We invited VIP’s in the Auckland startup scene such as Andy Hamilton, Justin Flitter and Unlimited magazine.
The thinking goes that if AKLSW does well then everyone at AKLSW benefits from having such people at the pitch part of the event on Sunday night.
We also started tweeting out thanking sponsors for their support of AKLSW.
I hope these lessons help anyone else at future startup weekends, or startups in general.
If you want to see the full video of the presentation, you can see it here.