I want to share my impressions about this event, which took place in the Kiev office of Ciklum. Photos taken from my Instagram account.

Introduction

I learned about this event quite by accident, in the process of organizing a hackathon in Kiev. In fact, creating a startup is my goal in the near future and there are a number of ideas waiting for implementation. Participation cost $ 40.

Why participate in such an event if you can do everything at home? I was trite interesting. I wanted to stir a sleeping start-up in myself.
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It all started with the fact that on Thursday evening there was a meeting with visiting engineers from Facebook (3 women and 1 boyfriend). One of the women, by the way, led the team developing Graph Search. For several hours it was possible to ask them questions and get answers. They spoke English, although the guy and one girl could speak Russian. The first photo shows that quite a lot of people have come, because this is a photo of about a third of the room.



There were many questions, including the workflow on Facebook, the principles of their work, Graph Search, work with servers and so on. But all this was only the beginning, because they arrived at Kyiv Startup Weekend.

Day 1

I bought a ticket through Eventbrite . For my iPhone there was an application and I saw this ticket with a QR code. When I arrived, the QR code was unavailable, but this did not prevent the organizers from finding me in the lists and giving them badges.

Let's start with them. One badge on which you need to write your name, and the second to indicate who you are - developer, designer, marketing, business guy, mentor. Each of these badges has its own color and you can easily understand who is who.

Initially, I thought it would be a kind of hackathon, but for 54 hours instead of 24.

It all started with a greeting and meeting people. The game passed, where people in the hall first called any words and then we were divided into teams that received 2 words each and had to come up with a business model of a startup (even just ridiculous). I pulled out two words to my team - “kickback” and “venture”. We came up with a venture fund that took money from investors and invested in startups for kickbacks. The successful projects of our "fund" called the Ukrainian roads, Aerosvit and Hyunday. :-)



Then began what all came for. Anyone could go out and share his idea with the audience (even completely raw). In total, 47 ideas came out.

After that, for some time (it seems 30 minutes), I had to look for people in my team. Everyone who put forward an idea (it was possible to put forward only 1 idea) received a special large piece of paper on which it was possible to describe his idea and indicate the number.

There were so many participants with ideas that it seemed that they were just not free to join the projects. But they were, and I still could not find anyone. It felt like chaos - everyone told each other about their ideas and tried to lure to their side. As a result, there was another guy who also writes in Python, as well as the girl and we had ideas that were different, but directed in one direction. We decided to unite, because teams of 1 person can no longer participate there, but just did not want to go home.

Until midnight, we talked to reduce our three ideas to one "super-idea."

Day 2

We arrived at 8.30 to start working on our project. In addition, at 8.30 there was breakfast, and at 9.00 we had a skype chat with Steve Blank. He told us about several stories from his life and then it was possible to ask him questions if anyone had any. When I became myself in front of a laptop, I forgot my question and nevertheless asked something :-) My question was reduced to what to do if you still have money, you believe in the idea, but there is still no way for users or sales to come. In principle, it was possible and so guess about his answer, but still it was interesting to hear. He said about the construction of hypotheses and their verification.

During the day, we communicated with people, conducted a survey of friends and participants of the competition in order to test our hypothesis.



Then everyone began to work on their ideas. During the day, mentors came to us and asked a lot of different questions. In just a day, they were approached by 6. Two were from start-up incubators (WannaBiz and EastLabs). We received their contact details. Also, entrepreneurs came up and one of them launched a startup in Silicon Valley. We learned a lot of interesting things.

That's how many people love to eat.



Towards evening, everyone began to disperse, so there were quite a few people who were awake at night, if there were any at all.



We interviewed more than 100 people per day.

Day 3

It's time to write the code. In the morning I made the landing page for us and started working on importing data from various social networks. Mentors came from Facebook.

When it was time for the final performances, we were the second. As the participants of Kyiv Startup Weekend I said, this time the teams were much stronger than the previous ones. Some even presented not just software, but also technical devices with written applications for Android and iPhone for 54 hours. There was a team that during this time managed to make an application and negotiate sales.

We did not win a prize, but I came to get experience and find like-minded people who also want to do business.

More photos you can see on the event page in Facebook: Kyiv Startup Weekend II .

If you have questions, I will be glad to answer them.