A startup created in a single weekend at Startup Weekend Las Vegas, and man was it fun!>
If you are not familiar with Startup Weekend, Here is the premise
In just 54 hours, you will experience the highs, lows, fun, and pressure that make up life at a startup. As you learn how to create a real company, you’ll meet the very best mentors, investors, cofounders, and sponsors who are ready to help you get started.
The Experience
Let me start off by saying that Startup Weekend was awesome, and this will not be my last one! We started at 6pm on a Friday night with dinner and to follow was everybody getting in front of a microphone pitching an idea that could be turned into a startup. From the good, the bad, the ugly, ideas were flowing through that building.
Of course we could not keep all of the ideas, so Techstars, the company that put on the event narrowed the ideas down to the top 10 by audience vote. After the vote, everyone is to find a startup to work on over the weekend that you found interesting AND that was a good fit based on your expertise and experience.
There were two ideas that stood out to me the most, but one in particular drew me in due to the people in the group. The people that make up your team is one of the most important factors when starting any business from the ground up. I walked up to a group of chill individuals who told me what their roles were and I stated I was an amazing designer and their response, “Well I guess we have our team then…”. From that point on it was right to work.
The next set of instructions was that we needed to put together a business plan, a presentation deck, and a working prototype of our idea, all by Sunday night! In my head I was thinking, “How in the world are we going to pull this off?” Planning and executing is how, and that is exactly what we did to follow meeting my new team.
The Idea
Without giving away to many details our idea was simply creating a platform that helped restaurants/retail stores manage employees shifts and schedules. Most places of employment still rely on paper and pen to post their employee schedules, and when an employee chooses to not come in to work because tonight is the Bruno Mars concert, they make a phone call and the manager is calling around trying to find someone to fill the dropped shift. We became that managers new savior, and now New Years Eve will be filled with employees who actually want to be there!
The Work
My role was to of course create the brand and the logo, and make it look amazing so the judges know that we are serious about this. The name of the startup was “Staffed” and that is what you see above. Used a vibrant green to grab peoples attention and to show that our solution provides a sense of growth for your business. The orange accented color represents an aggressive approach to getting something done. If a shift is filled within the app it will have a red-orange checkmark letting the world know. I used a lowercase font because this will eventually be tailored to help the employees which is a younger audience for sure!
While I am creating the brand our team was working on the actual app itself, the business plan, our website, the presentation deck, and of course the final pitch!
The Outcome
So the last day comes around after long hours of work from early mornings to late nights, it is pitch day. Our startup was called to pitch our idea after the other 7 teams pitched their idea and our team leader, Andrew, killed it! And because of all of our hard work, we got 3rd place! As a prize, we received 3 months of FREE coworking office space, an Amazon gift card, and 1 hour of FREE consultation with a local marketing agency.
The whole idea of Startup Weekend is to start a startup over the weekend and let that just be a jumpstart to getting that startup off the ground after the weekend is over! That is exactly what we are going to do! The office space makes it that more official. We were also featured in the LVRJ for placing, which is also pretty official.lol
'Third place went to Staffed, a platform that incentivizes employees to fill empty shifts at their workplace. "We’re really pleased we actually placed," said team member Andrew Smith. "People recognize there’s validity here, and we can actually get this off the ground."' -LVRJ
The Conclusion
I will recommend Startup Weekend to anybody and everybody with an entreprenuer mindset. One thing I realized after this weekend was that there is no excuse for you to not get something created and/or atleast validated within 72 hours. I have ideas all of the time, and my excuse for not executing them is always time. Time has been redefined for me and now I have a team of passionate individuals who consider me a teammate to help make any of our ideas a reality!
👍🏾 Thanks for reading.