Startup Weekend

This past Saturday, I was asked to coach and mentor a number of entrepreneur teams that were competing in a "Startup Weekend" event at Fairleigh Dickinson University. It was a great event with over 50 competitors and more than 20 teams.

See the recent article in the Star Ledger about the event.

It was a real glimpse into how hard it is to chart out a space that has not been taken. Many teams came up with interesting ideas but quickly found out that others had already monetized them. Even if they thought their variant was unique and had significant value ...  getting the word out ... organizing around it ... and competing in a deflationary SAAS environment characterized by lots of 'free' services became a show stopper.


The few ideas that seem to have potential recognized these factors and found very specific problem sets that had not been occupied by large and evolving entities such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. They found ways to minimize capital requirements, development efforts and operating costs by leveraging cloud based services and distributed variable cost sales and marketing.

Unless you have a blockbuster idea that's truly revolutionary and are able to find investors who will fund agressive marketing plans ... narrow, targeted, simple, scalable, variable cost driven and viral ideas have the best chance for success.

While resources to start a business have never been cheaper ... good ideas and execution are getting harder and harder to define. They're out there ... just need to sift through a lot of ideas till you find one that fits.