Interesting journey to Startup Weekend Szczecin ended just now. We have definitely made our mark and have stolen some of the attention. Lots of feedback and some extremaly important one. I figured that I don’t need that much feedback as I need solutions. I’m generally not interested in feedback alone (also known as: what people like or not), unless I’m selling them something The fact that we didn’t expect to sell, or frankly even attract a quarter of attention we got, could be potentially a problem on it’s own as we never thought of attennding for selling anything. We don’t plan to suck off anyone’s cash as I have idea of my own about “startups” living on raising money from pockets of investors and not by supporting themselves by old fashioned profits So why are we even bothered? Well, we’ve met extremaly intelligent people who wanted to share their experience too (not all of them wanted to share*). Perhaps, as usual, I expected more than it was possible to achieve, but having to hear two killer ideas per weekend is pretty good too, right?
For the future we need to play more the underdog. What someone has suggested to me is the very fact we weren’t the guys with a broken laptop (who won) but the guys with most of the laptops got us into trouble. Well, I don’t believe in that, but the fact is that we were open about our formal existence prior to this weekend wasn’t smart. Most of the teams met and created products for years ahead the weekend which (fact, can be checked within 5 mins of dilligence) but none of them were foolish as we were to admit that For the same reason we need to be making big eyes and open our ears more rather than talk. If someone approaches us next time to talk about project management we need to shut up and keep nodding with a “oh really?” no matter what they say. That makes some idiots feel important and makes us more likeable. Well, at least so I was told. Important distinction is that we need to go out to our clients with full power knowledge about solutions to their problems and deny the very knowledge to ourselves next time we go around people who think about themselves like divas. There’s no single true face we can present to all. After all, it’s about making everyone happy
* Even if some of the guys clearly have been mentoring projects for the first time in their life and it showed most commonly by lack of solution driven thinking (don’t like blue, don’t know which colour I like) either by attitude or just plain inexperience. Two of the mentors have really played hard with some attitude too. One guy really annoyed and made some personal comments against me, other mentor addressed organiser addressed not the organisers, but again one of organisers personally and took his vendetta but so it goes