Charlotte Startup Weekend – Part 3: Saturday (a.k.a., The Big Pivot)

The Lending Circles team

The Lending Circles team — Rex, Olaf, and me — got started bright and early Saturday morning.  The idea behind Lending Circles is to bring the South African stokvel into the digital banking age via SMS.  There’s been a big push to deliver services to the underbanked via SMS, since much of the developing world has better access to pre-paid mobile phones than a landline or regular Internet connection. But as recently as 2009, South African communities didn’t have access to banking products that would work with a stokvel.

Word of the Day

A stokvel is a community savings account.  Generally run by groups of women in a village, each family contributes a set amount every month.  Each month, one family is allowed to withdraw a portion larger than their contribution and pay it back.  At the end of the year, the entire pot is divvied up.

We had a ton of items to prepare before Sunday: market analysis, competitor analysis, financials, ramp-up strategy, costs, minimum viable product, etc.  It was about 8:00 pm that evening when Rex brought up some bad news.

It seems that South African banks had just recently started offering stokvel accounts.

Word of the Day, encore edition

In Startup Weekend parlance, a pivot is that moment when you realize the concept you’ve been working on is for shit, and you have to start over.

To recap: It’s late on Saturday night, presentations must be ready by 5:30 the next day, and all of our work so far is for naught.  We’ve lost over 1/2 of our available working time.  Not to mention the fact that we have to find a replacement concept.

It took us until almost midnight, but we managed to evolve the original idea into a new pitch: StokFel.  This new business would be aimed at the U.S. market initially, taking the South African stokvel idea and applying it to Americans who have trouble saving (more on the concept in a later post).

We agreed to break for the night and arrive back early Sunday morning, with fresh ideas on how to build and pitch this new concept.

 

Charlotte Startup Weekend – Part 2: Friday Night

The first night of Charlotte Startup Weekend is devoted primarily to the pitches.  Everyone is invited to present their business idea to the entire group.  You have sixty seconds…GO!

I decided to make a pitch, not because I was enamored of my idea (I had only come up with it a few days beforehand), but for the practice.

Once all the pitches have been made, everyone is given two tickets which they use to vote on their favorite pitches.  The top six were chosen:

• Dog Dash Game — an iPhone driving game where you use audio-only cues to navigate.
• RandoText — send text messages to your friends from random phone numbers.
• EventVine — Instant event gratification
• DADD (My Autopilot) — mobile app providing access to designated driver services
• HarvestGeek — use the power of Arduino to give local growers powerful analytics on their crops
• Lending Circles — Deliver mobile banking options to the traditionally unbanked

I had met Rex Salisbury during the networking beforehand, along with Olaf Maltha, and we took turns practicing our pitches with each other and getting feedback.  Rex’s pitch was “Lending Circles” and made it to the next stage, and I joined that group with Olaf.  The three of us were the only ones on the team, which was surprising to me because it seemed the most exciting and ambitious of the projects.

Here’s the pitch by Rex for Lending Circles

We tried to recruit some developers to our cause, since actually building a products was part of the goal for the weekend.  But to no avail.

It was about 10:30 by that point, and we decided to meet back at Packard Place early Saturday morning to get started.

Startup Weekend – Preview

There are many ways to found a startup. This one came out of Startup Weekend Charlotte, a 54-hour long contest held at Packard Place in uptown Charlotte. The premise is simple: join a group, work your ass off, make your pitch to a panel of judges. Here’s the basic schedule:

The audience waits to hear the pitches from the first night of Startup Weekend

Friday Night

1. Anyone who wants makes a sixty second pitch to the entire group.  Everyone gets 2 votes to place for any of the pitches.  The top 5 or 6 move on to the next phase.
2. Once the top pitches are known, you select one to work on for the weekend.

Saturday

1. Your team gets organized and you start working on your business plan and working product.  One of the major goals of the startup weekend is to have a minimal viable product ready to show.
2. Work!!!
3. Realize you have to make a substantial change to some (or all) of your business plan.  This is called a pivot, and generally happens late Saturday.  Freak out a bit.

Sunday

1. Buckle down and make optimistic plans for what you can accomplish before 5:30, now that much of what you did Saturday no longer applies.
2. Work!!
3. Prepare your presentation
4. Spend dinner fretting over your presentation
5. Present
6. Get feedback from the judges