By Zion Campo
So, curious about what Startup Weekend is? Want to know what happens during the three days of grueling days and nights. Here’s a little glimpse of what goes down during these three days from a participant himself:
In school, we typically run into situations where we are forced to finish a school project in a short span of time. To beat the deadline, you are thrown into a weekend overnight gathering with your projectmates trying desperately to finish your project before Monday.
There is coffee, there are midnight shenanigans, good memories with friends and a whole lot of stuff that goes down over the weekend.
But Startup Weekend is a lot more than that.
You’re given 54 hours over the weekend to create something. From ideation to creation, Startup Weekend will up the stakes of your typical school weekend project overnight with a taste of startup drama!
You will get to feel how your idea gets turned down because you’re awesome world changing idea wasn’t given any stars at all. You will get to experience being high in Cloud 9 because a lot of people love your idea and has been chosen as one of the ideas that get to pitch at the final pitching showdown!
Then magically, over the weekend, you meet your team, yes, your A TEAM! Finally! You start working on the startup and then you get into problems. Your idea may not be viable after you try to validate the idea.
You have a couple of choices, pivot your idea, overhaul your whole idea, or push it.
After thinking over what is your team’s next move, you and your team reach a consensus. We’ll make a couple of changes to the idea!
Then pitch day comes and you are ball full of nerves, you stand up on stage and you either fail at pitching what your idea is to the judges and audience or you will flawlessly and eloquently present your idea and well, might get a shot at winning the Startup Weekend Bohol 2nd Edition winner!
And after accepting the reality that entrepreneurship is no mean feat – that there is a whole lot to starting a startup than just an idea and technical skills, you understand why a lot of people say that starting a business is risky but a risk worth taking
After all the drama you go through Startup Weekend, you look back and realize how much you have grown over a short span of time and how much you enjoyed getting out there and doing stuff and not just talking over and over and over your idea like a broken record.