Image cc-licensed from flickr
So, on Thursday, I attended Bournemouth Startup Meetup, organised by Luke Williams. I've been a regular attendee of these events since they started, and they've produced some interesting chatter and I've met some interesting people there. This week, it was a small turnout, but that helped us focus on an agenda. At barcamp bournemouth, Jon Markwell spoke about his impending idea for a Brighton based startup competition, so our discussion was focussed on how we could do something similar for Bournemouth and the rest of Dorset.
There was some very healthy and passionate debate about what shape a competition like this should take. The idea that Jon presented at barcamp, tentatively titled "BrightHack" focussed away from money and much more towards mentoring and providing a framework for people working towards startups in their spare time.
I've thought about this a bit. I think there is a lot of value in a competition like this, and I've been working towards start-up ideas in my spare time, too (twitfave being my most successful effort so far). However, there's really a need for a Y Combinator like entity in the UK, to enable people to take ideas to fruition full time.
The debate at startup meetup split along two lines, which I think was mostly determined by the situations of the parties involved in the debate. Those of us who have less long term commitments were a lot more interested in an event which required a full time commitment from the participants and gained a small amount of money from investors in order to pay living costs for the teams. The others were more interested in an event which provided no funding for the startups, but concentrated on forming part time teams and providing a prize at the end.
I was part of the former group, and so that's what I'm going to concentrate on talking about for the moment. That said, I think there's room for both of these things to happen, and they could share an awards event at the end of the projects.
Here's what I'd like - an event focussed around getting teams and ideas together followed by a three month period (supported by an angel investor or similar) of building these applications leading up to a competition based on the work done by the teams over the three months. At the end of the three months, hopefully, the competition will attract enough attention that the teams will attract further investment.
I think the teams should be built of :
- three people who work on the project full time, living and working in the same house
- an involved and interested investor
- mentors, available for advice for the team
The required investment for the living costs of three people is not a particularly large amount - lets make an assumption that in Bournemouth, you could support three people for three months for about £7,000. Even if you did this in Central London, I couldn't imagine it being more than twice that price. If the event got enough exposure, I could well imagine that one of the more startup friendly hosting companies could be persuaded to provide hosting for all of these projects in return for sponsoring the event.
Tom Harvey had the rather brilliant idea that if we hurried to make this happen, you could rent sections of a universities halls over the summer at a cheap price. This has the advantage of potentially putting all of the startup teams in one place.
I have a couple of ideas I'd love to work on if we could make something like this happen - who else would be interested in it ?
9 comments so far
Great idea though and were I in other circumstances I'd definitely be interested.
Good luck with progressing the idea :)
My thought on it is that despite the lower number of people it might attract, the teams will be much more likely to produce good products at the end, as they'll have the time to do so and clearly have the motivation.
Regarding students, I think that's an interesting thing to talk about. It's worth bearing in mind that Google was founded whilst the founders were at university and Bill Gates dropped out of university at 20 to found Microsoft. Actually, students would be a large part of the target audience for something like this, mixed in with people who have more experience in the industry. But for students, this is the lowest risk - particularly those just finishing their degrees. If something like this could happen just after an academic year, students could do this straight after they finish (possibly with more experienced people working with them). Work for a summer, if the project fails, go and get a normal job (with the benefit of having some work experience in a startup) - if it succeeds, then the beginning of your career is set up.
On the plus side, it's not just students who potentially have the free time. I know I had ideas that I couldn't run with when I was running my own business - just because I needed the client work to keep my head above water. Having just a _little_ bit more money would have meant I could justify giving something a whirl 24/7.
So - best of luck! If you need a hand gizza shout :-)
Might also be worth talking to the Enterprise Pavilion at Arts Institute Bournemouth (Matt or David) about incubator space. If an Angel (or syndicate) put up some rent money that might work.
Most of the University Biz Plan competitions have lots of in-kind prizes (lawyer services, accountants, marketeers, etc) but often you just need survival living allowance and top-quality introductions to key client groups / exit routes.
I definitely think as student project it has alot of legs as if you're just covering accomodation and essentials you could certainly get the numbers. Then perhaps just a few 'leaders' in the form of more experienced people, but I still think they will be few and far between, someone with experience and the willingness to babysit a project they're only a small part of, unpaid. If they were that way inclined and had the willing and ability, why not do it for themselves... but I guess I'm somewhat describing yourself Mark so I guess you have the answers to that ;).
From your perspective I guess it gives you a decent sized team to get a startup off the ground with rather than battling it out by yourself?
I wasn't so much thinking of this as being a competition. I'm not sure that having a group of teams competing directly against each other at the same time as trying to start businesses together would be that effective.
The key thing I want to make happen is for a group of teams working on technology start ups to work together towards a common goal over a fixed period of time. That common goal would be similar to YCombinator's demo day, to have a product to show that's ready for either investment or revenue. The time period would be 10 weeks which is the same amount of time YCombinator works within. The benefits of this would be:
1) Collectively they would be interesting enough for a number of investors and members of the media to come to see them. They won't have to waste time looking for investors & media contacts.
2) They could work together to solve common problems that can often be a big distraction from a startup's core businesses. They won't have to waste so much time on legal and financial stuff.
3) By meeting every week for the 10 weeks they would motivate each other to keep going even through the low times. They'll waste less time procrastinating.
I'm primarily interested in making this work with people who are bootstrapping their startups by working on them part-time. This is because it's the situation I'm in. I also think trying to secure funding to make this work any other way would take too long and add loads of bureaucracy that will again distract people from actually getting their products built. [1]
I'm very keen for this to be primarily about peer support, there are always loads of people that want to be mentors for these sorts of things but it's difficult to choose those that would add real value rather than creating more distractions. I would bring in a handful of experienced people to speak at the weekly events that may provide some mentoring. I'd also organise a couple of more open networking events to help people make a few extra connections.
Should probably write a blog post about this... ;)
[1] If any of you have £100K - £150K you'd be willing to invest across 4 to 8 very early stage companies please drop me a line. You'd need to commit to putting all the money in and choosing where it goes based on little more than a 10 minute conversation with each team. You'd also need to be happy with giving each startup a valuation of at least £200K based on their team and idea alone. I'd guess that 20-30% of the cash would probably need to be spent on legal stuff rather than product development.
In short: Go for it! I'd be very interested in watching it develop and in providing any support I can.