My experience of participating to a startup weekend competition in Italy

I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.

In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.

You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.

Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.

There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.

I love your enthusiasm so let me share some hard-won learnings with you.

In my view, entrepreneurs spend way too little time on the problem space and rather jump into the solution space very quickly (way too quickly).

The world is full of problems people accept to live with that they just don't consider important enough to solve.

That's the essence of Paul Graham's 'build what people want, not what people need' which is the founder of YC.

People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.

Once you understand the full context and why they do what they do, you can identify the core problem and related "jobs-to-be-done" which really helps in setting product and marketing strategy as well as positioning towards others.

You can do all this with spending very little money to be honest, you may have to put money as an incentive to get enough people to talk to.

And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.

Thanks for the great response! If you're curious how I handled this spike of traffic on a self-hosted Ghost blog, I'm writing a follow-up on my website, you can subscribe to read it tomorrow: danielpetrica.com

A few weeks ago, I participated in a startup competition in Italy. Over a single weekend, my team had to develop a startup idea, validate it, and pitch it against other teams. In this article, I’ll share our experience and the key lessons that led us to victory

I went to a startup weekend maybe 9-10 years ago. It was a lot of fun. I didn't pick the best idea to work on, just the funnest sounding. Ended up with a small team (3 of us total) and we we're one of the only ones to actually have a good demo. I try to do some kind of hackfest every year now.

There is just something magical about working on something fun and pulling an all nighter.

That's is an interesting niche. I wonder if it is a lifestyle business or there is real potential for growth.

insane how much just showing up to these weekends opens up, i always end up meeting cool people and getting new ideas

>>> The first lesson we learned was that every great startup idea must solve a real problem.

Yeah this is just wrong.

You’ll hear it all the time everywhere but it’s still wrong.

Your startup does not NEED to solve a problem.

Unless of course you want to play word games and twist everything in life in terms of it being a problem.

It's always about the execution never about the idea. That is why Silicon Valley has such a track of success. Almost infinite amount of money to exhaust all possible execution paths. Even the worst ideas, will find eventually a success path.