Entrepreneuring 101: My intro to the startup world
There is a reason why the majority of startups fail and I had the opportunity to scrape (if it can be called that) the surface of this through an 'idea' formed from a hackathon competition.
"More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition."
Earlier this year, the Smart Cities Accelerator Lab & Environment (SCALE) San Diego hosted a hackathon where the ideas/teams that had potential in the hackathon were invited to participate in an extended competition that could further the ideas to a solution that the city currently needs in the form of a company/product. Focusing on three categories: food insecurity, city planning and vision zero; they each have some kind of impact not only on this city, but on many cities around the world.
Having this in mind, as the City of San Diego itself continues to develop and has the vision to be exemplary at a global scale, the implementation of smart city integration in the infrastructure as well as having open data sources does no good without active participation from everyone (public institutions, private institutions and the general public) in order to see a city that grows according to what the people have to say.
Being a firm believer in this and with some time, prior to this event, of having followed this organization that is driven by leveraging data as well as technology to solve problems like these, I decided to participate. Despite having no previous experience in entrepreneurship and hackathon competitions, I learned a lot from this experience in terms of what it means to dedicate time to a project like this and collaborate in a small team setting with practically a group of strangers.
Starting off with the hackathon itself, there were teams that already had polished ideas before beginning the hackathon and there were others that did not even have team members. I was lucky enough to meet my future team members, as you can see below, that allowed me to contribute to their idea - a crowdhosting parking space app. Given that this idea already exists through apps like Pavemint, there were many features that we had to define in order to set ourselves apart, but in the end they were not enough to prove this was a good idea to develop. Despite the fact that this idea did not pass to the extended competition, the team collaborated well enough to go through this crowdhosting idea that an alternative idea was suggested - a public participation app.
In San Diego, and in many cities around the world, the way cities hear people's concerns (if they happen to) are through meetings with the public that most of the time are in the middle of the day when everyone is working and the people who do show up may or may not truly represent the general public's ideas. In addition to this, most people still have limited time outside of work to spend; so in order to overcome this obstacle of democratization, a digital form of polling for things like development would have to be implemented. This is where a public participation app would come in.
Giving people the power to decide on options that are suggested by the city along with costs, expected deadlines, etc. All in order to increase transparency from the government and efficiently work into the next generation of urban living, where representation and prosperity can (hopefully) be fairly distributed.
Guided by our drive to make some kind of social impact through business, we saw this opportunity to bring the idea to life and agreed to continue in the competition. What would happen in the following weeks though, did test how dedicated we all were to this drive and in this new path.
"Most people are in a rush to succeed, but...living a gritty life is more like a marathon."
Angela Lee Duckworth, couldn't have said it better than me, but "most people are in a rush to succeed" and it did feel like that in our case. Segmented improperly, mainly due to (I think) our lack of experience, the work we made, felt like we were going continuously in circles with barely enough progress despite having a really great idea to be implemented at real scale. The first couple of weeks worked out well, our team was meeting a couple of times a week and the idea became more well defined with contribution from all members. After this period and the first pre-mvp was being worked on, blurry deadlines appeared and limited feedback started to creep up. Following from this, unsynchronized coordination, miscommunication, a stagnated drive along with practically no guaranteed funds ended up leading to our demise - withdrawing from the competition.
Known from the start, I was treating this competition as a transitional learning experience and the lessons learned the hard way definitely made a positive contribution in my life as I was also unemployed during this time. Choosing the next step in the path is key towards where we would like to end up, and at first it did feel like this was a waste of time, but I did end up meeting great people as well as learning skills that I did not have. If there were any things that I would do for the next time it would be to really know who to choose for members/founders, have some manageable skill-set (or knowledge at least) in what I am building, defining a workable business model and learn to walk before running.
Thank you again for all of the help and contributions Noura, Amanda, Ben and the SCALE team made from this experience!
If you are interested about the project, you can see where we left off in github.