Everything you should know about Startup Weekend Helsinki
This is how it felt to participate in Startup Weekend Helsinki food edition
Last weekend several Startup Weekend events were held in multiple cities at the same time. For those who are not familiar with Startup Weekend, it’s a 54-hour event where you pitch your idea, form teams around the best ideas and move them forward with the help of the mentors. During the whole event everything was very well planned, like if it was the 1000th time they were doing it and every single detail was taken care of. Startup Weekend is sponsored by several companies including Google and Techstars among others. But this was a special edition. This time the topic was food, and this is where it gets interesting.
How to innovate in a traditional industry like the food industry? The food industry is slowly changing. There are several trends identified that will dictate the future of what we eat and how we eat it. We are building a food culture where healthy food is becoming not only a trend but also a way of life. The biohacking culture is growing and expanding among enthusiasts, we are becoming every time more aware of our health and our available time.
Another trend is food delivery. There’s a huge ecosystem of startups tackling this problem from several angles. From manufacturing to distribution, from pop-up restaurants and ghost restaurants to all the apps dedicated to aggregate and distribute food. Companies like Foodora, Wolt or Epic are examples of companies proving that there’s a market to tackle.
Getting around the idea and the team
During the first day, the main goal was to filter out the best ideas and form the teams that would opt to the prize. After the initial pitches, each one of the presenters took a small sign with a summary of the idea and people had 3 stickers with their names and abilities to put in their favourite ideas. As a result, 11 groups were formed.
My idea was to provide a service that would deliver you the food that you need for your diet to your doorstep, so that you wouldn’t need to worry about counting calories, going to the grocery store or cooking food.
After exposing my idea few people showed interest in it, most of them with very interesting profiles that would benefit the business. Interestingly, even one of them used to be a partner of a company that was doing the same thing, but that company closed some time ago. So we got lots of insights, mistakes to avoid in the execution and experience in the sector. At the end, we formed a team of 4 people from different backgrounds. Forming the team with the adequate people was key to make the idea move forward and I was really lucky to get people with different skill sets that complemented each other.
Validating the idea
Validating an idea is always hard. You get a lot of feedback, different people have different needs and you need to know to filter out what’s noise and what’s not. Because of this, it took us a bit longer than we thought to validate the idea.
Validating an idea is always hard. You get a lot of feedback, different people have different needs and you need to know to filter out what’s noise and what’s not.
We started by wrapping our heads around the idea and the details. After that, we wrote a questionnaire and went to ask people if they had the problems we were assuming they had, and if our solution would solve some of those problems. The results were amazing. After one hour of interviewing strangers, we found out that most of them had problems dieting and they said they would buy our service. One of the things that came up a lot was eating healthy, rather than dieting. This was the bit that threw us off a little, so we started thinking about just providing healthy food instead of diet food.
This change required analysing a totally different market that turned out to be a Red Ocean. Already few companies were delivering the very same value proposition in Finland. At that point we got stuck and quite frustrated, and it was thanks to the mentors that we realised we should go back to the initial idea and work out the details.
Polishing the details
At this point it was the last day of the Startup Weekend and there were few problems we still needed to tackle. Those problems were mainly: distribution, manufacturing and costs.
Let’s start with the first problem: delivery. We found out that there are no companies in Helsinki to whom we could subcontract to deliver the meals, so we would have to do that by ourselves. That would mean having people working part time on that. The good thing compared with other companies that are delivering food is that we can batch deliver meals instead of having to repeatedly go from a restaurant to the delivery address. That also means we can brand the delivery crew and train them to be aligned with the company values to improve the experience of our customers.
Manufacturing was also a big problem to tackle. One of the teams was working on a “co-working space for restaurants” which would be perfect for us, although the most realistic alternative in the long run would be to have our own kitchen. Some of the mentors also suggested using some restaurant’s kitchen to bootstrap the first customers and validate the idea better.
And last but not least we took a closer look at the costs of the whole process, from getting the raw materials to manufacturing, delivery and salaries. Based on that information we could determine the pricing and also see what were the biggest costs and figure out some ways to cut them down.
The role of mentors
Mentors helped us all the time, providing very valuable feedback and ideas. Probably the best feedback that we got was at the same time the most devastating. When someone walks in and tells you that your idea is not going to work and provides good reasons, it immediately brings you down to Earth and makes you think more and better about different things from value proposition to customer segment or execution details. In our case, we found the role of mentors a key element in the success of the event.
Probably the best feedback that we got was at the same time the most devastating.
Conclusions
The Startup Weekend event was really fun. It was also quite exhausting and intensive, but it eventually paid off. The main takeaways for me were how to validate a business with a unique value proposition, differentiate it from your competitors and solve a real problem. Although nothing really new, it’s good to practise these things. The event was a perfect place to do networking and I met a lot of awesome people with different kinds of ideas and backgrounds. I warmly recommend people interested in entrepreneurship to attend, and I most definitely will repeat next time.
PS: Thank you for reading! If you want to know more about me go to: xavimagrinya.com
