Report on the startup conference Spark.me
Not so long ago, I read Mail.ru's blog about upcoming conferences for startup founders. Since at that moment my husband and I were working on our project , it interested me. About startups as such, we still did not know anything, but decided to participate anyway.
The choice was between the closest in time and geographically accessible conferences in Europe.
These were the Bitspiration Festival in Poland and Spark.me in Montenegro. The absence of the need to make a visa, and the opportunity to visit the most beautiful country of Europe, did their job. And we went to Montenegro on Spark.me .
The program of the conference was a school for startups, the conference itself and the competition among startups.
We have applied for both the start-up school and the competition. But, unfortunately, we were approved only to participate in the school. This is of course a minus, but the plus was free tickets to participate in the conference.
')
And so, vacation is taken, tickets are bought, and now ... we are in Montenegro.
A little indent from the topic. A few words about Montenegro itself.
A small, cozy country with friendly Aborigines. Wonderful nature. Tired of looking at the sea, turn around 180 degrees and admire the mountains.
In a startup school for ourselves, we brought out the main motto of startups - “Do your homework”. Nothing should happen spontaneously. For each event, meeting, presentation, pitch need to be prepared. To have the answers to all possible questions, “Know your numbers” - to know everything related to your project and even more.
For two days of school for startups, we learned a lot. Since we were pretty little familiar with the theme of startups as such, and just released their first Android application, a new world full of interesting people and opportunities opened up before us. Now we know what bootstrap, accelerators and crowdfunding are. When to rely on yourself, and when it is possible to turn to venture funds. How to develop your network of useful acquaintances, write letters to prospective partners and make presentations of your projects. We also stressed the importance of a well-knit team and the focus of each of its participants on the result.
An incredibly interesting report was read to us by Ellie Zheleva on the topic “User research and design thinking”. Having identified an important problem of all startups, in her opinion, this is the lack of research on user needs before the start of product sales.
All school participants had the opportunity to make a pitch about their project and get specific recommendations and advice from Max Gurvits and John Biggs . It was a very interesting experience and we received specific advice and possible directions for development.
We also took part in a master class under the leadership of Ellie Zheleva, in which the path of creating a project was passed, from the generation of an idea to the pitch of this idea in front of an audience. Very useful, in our opinion, a master class covering the main stages of the project.
At the end of the second day, a surprise from Heather Russell awaited us in the form of the wonderful game “Pitch what”.
The game can participate an unlimited number of participants and alcohol. The deck goes in a circle and the two previous players, stretching out on the map, simultaneously speak one of the words written on it. (For example, "Sheep" and "Tooth", "Chew" and "Zombies"). And the next player is given 5 seconds to use these two words together to come up with a possible product with such a name and try to sell it to the entire audience. If everyone liked the pitch of the speaker, then he gets two cards with words, but anyone can offer his own version and then the best one will be determined by voting. The winner is the one with the most cards. This game warms up brains and helps generate ideas on the go.
The conference itself also lasted two days and was conducted in one stream. As participants of the school for startups, we received such badges, on the back of which there was a schedule of all reports.
The most prominent speaker in our opinion was Alf Rehn , he, speaking first, literally lit the entire hall and set the mood of the entire conference. In his report, which was called “Innovation Bullshit, Innovation Crisis”, he emphasized how much the word innovation has lost its value and lost its original meaning. An example of the apogee of the senselessness of the modern IT industry, he called the application “Yo” , in which you can do nothing, except that you send a message with the text “Yo” to your interlocutor. This startup received an investment of $ 1,000,000 and this, in the opinion of the speaker, and in our opinion also, is proof of the absurdity of the current situation in the industry.
Most modern applications are not created to help those people who need it, not to solve their immediate problems, but only to meet the solvent masses. The speaker introduced the term “Innovation pornografy”, which allows us to draw a parallel between sex and innovation. In sex, in which everything is not so simple, circumstances do not always turn out well in it, everything does not always work out and everything is very different from pornography, in which everything is so beautiful and easy. So with innovations that are easy and pleasant to talk about at conferences, but which are not so easy to bring to life, especially real innovations that change people's lives for the better.
All speakers and topics that they discussed can be viewed on the conference website http://spark.me/speakers/ . And we just want to say a huge thank you to the conference organizing team, which gave all 101% and gathered in one place such interesting people who inspired the whole hall to make this world a better place.
An important part of the conference was competition between seven startups. The teams represented such countries as Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Germany, Slovenia and Russia.
Competitions were held in two stages. In the first, the teams were given the opportunity to talk about their project within 5 minutes and answer the questions of the judges. After that, the best startups were selected, who at the end of the second day of the conference got 3 minutes at their disposal to convince the judges to give them the top prize.
3 projects reached the final:
BodyRecog (Croatia) - an application that analyzes a person's photos and tracks changes in his body shape, changes in the volume of his muscle and fat mass.
Edgar the Storyteller (Slovenia) is a platform for creating promotional stories and marketing for hand-makers of any direction.
The winner was a project called Fishing Booker (Serbia) - a service that allows you to book tourist fishing anywhere in the world. The entire team of this project was given the opportunity to present their project at TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 in San Francisco (paid for flights and accommodation).
Separately, I would like to emphasize the excellent organization of the entire conference, including lunch on all days and a lot of various nishtyachkov, as well as the coolest beach party in the only five-star hotel in Split, Budva Riviera. The entire conference on a separate screen broadcast the latest tweets with the tag #sparkme.
PS Phrases that we remember from the conference participants:
“Porn is lovely, sex is messy. Talking about innovation is lovely, innovating is messy ”
“Know your numbers”
“Ideas like buses, next one will come”
“Something for everybody is something for nobody”
“The safest thing to take the risk”
“Social media is garbage”
“Don't take your business”
The choice was between the closest in time and geographically accessible conferences in Europe.
These were the Bitspiration Festival in Poland and Spark.me in Montenegro. The absence of the need to make a visa, and the opportunity to visit the most beautiful country of Europe, did their job. And we went to Montenegro on Spark.me .
The program of the conference was a school for startups, the conference itself and the competition among startups.
We have applied for both the start-up school and the competition. But, unfortunately, we were approved only to participate in the school. This is of course a minus, but the plus was free tickets to participate in the conference.
')
And so, vacation is taken, tickets are bought, and now ... we are in Montenegro.
A little indent from the topic. A few words about Montenegro itself.
A small, cozy country with friendly Aborigines. Wonderful nature. Tired of looking at the sea, turn around 180 degrees and admire the mountains.
Startup School
In a startup school for ourselves, we brought out the main motto of startups - “Do your homework”. Nothing should happen spontaneously. For each event, meeting, presentation, pitch need to be prepared. To have the answers to all possible questions, “Know your numbers” - to know everything related to your project and even more.
For two days of school for startups, we learned a lot. Since we were pretty little familiar with the theme of startups as such, and just released their first Android application, a new world full of interesting people and opportunities opened up before us. Now we know what bootstrap, accelerators and crowdfunding are. When to rely on yourself, and when it is possible to turn to venture funds. How to develop your network of useful acquaintances, write letters to prospective partners and make presentations of your projects. We also stressed the importance of a well-knit team and the focus of each of its participants on the result.
An incredibly interesting report was read to us by Ellie Zheleva on the topic “User research and design thinking”. Having identified an important problem of all startups, in her opinion, this is the lack of research on user needs before the start of product sales.
All school participants had the opportunity to make a pitch about their project and get specific recommendations and advice from Max Gurvits and John Biggs . It was a very interesting experience and we received specific advice and possible directions for development.
We also took part in a master class under the leadership of Ellie Zheleva, in which the path of creating a project was passed, from the generation of an idea to the pitch of this idea in front of an audience. Very useful, in our opinion, a master class covering the main stages of the project.
At the end of the second day, a surprise from Heather Russell awaited us in the form of the wonderful game “Pitch what”.
The game can participate an unlimited number of participants and alcohol. The deck goes in a circle and the two previous players, stretching out on the map, simultaneously speak one of the words written on it. (For example, "Sheep" and "Tooth", "Chew" and "Zombies"). And the next player is given 5 seconds to use these two words together to come up with a possible product with such a name and try to sell it to the entire audience. If everyone liked the pitch of the speaker, then he gets two cards with words, but anyone can offer his own version and then the best one will be determined by voting. The winner is the one with the most cards. This game warms up brains and helps generate ideas on the go.
The conference
The conference itself also lasted two days and was conducted in one stream. As participants of the school for startups, we received such badges, on the back of which there was a schedule of all reports.
The most prominent speaker in our opinion was Alf Rehn , he, speaking first, literally lit the entire hall and set the mood of the entire conference. In his report, which was called “Innovation Bullshit, Innovation Crisis”, he emphasized how much the word innovation has lost its value and lost its original meaning. An example of the apogee of the senselessness of the modern IT industry, he called the application “Yo” , in which you can do nothing, except that you send a message with the text “Yo” to your interlocutor. This startup received an investment of $ 1,000,000 and this, in the opinion of the speaker, and in our opinion also, is proof of the absurdity of the current situation in the industry.
Most modern applications are not created to help those people who need it, not to solve their immediate problems, but only to meet the solvent masses. The speaker introduced the term “Innovation pornografy”, which allows us to draw a parallel between sex and innovation. In sex, in which everything is not so simple, circumstances do not always turn out well in it, everything does not always work out and everything is very different from pornography, in which everything is so beautiful and easy. So with innovations that are easy and pleasant to talk about at conferences, but which are not so easy to bring to life, especially real innovations that change people's lives for the better.
All speakers and topics that they discussed can be viewed on the conference website http://spark.me/speakers/ . And we just want to say a huge thank you to the conference organizing team, which gave all 101% and gathered in one place such interesting people who inspired the whole hall to make this world a better place.
Competition
An important part of the conference was competition between seven startups. The teams represented such countries as Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Germany, Slovenia and Russia.
Competitions were held in two stages. In the first, the teams were given the opportunity to talk about their project within 5 minutes and answer the questions of the judges. After that, the best startups were selected, who at the end of the second day of the conference got 3 minutes at their disposal to convince the judges to give them the top prize.
3 projects reached the final:
BodyRecog (Croatia) - an application that analyzes a person's photos and tracks changes in his body shape, changes in the volume of his muscle and fat mass.
Edgar the Storyteller (Slovenia) is a platform for creating promotional stories and marketing for hand-makers of any direction.
The winner was a project called Fishing Booker (Serbia) - a service that allows you to book tourist fishing anywhere in the world. The entire team of this project was given the opportunity to present their project at TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 in San Francisco (paid for flights and accommodation).
Results
Separately, I would like to emphasize the excellent organization of the entire conference, including lunch on all days and a lot of various nishtyachkov, as well as the coolest beach party in the only five-star hotel in Split, Budva Riviera. The entire conference on a separate screen broadcast the latest tweets with the tag #sparkme.
PS Phrases that we remember from the conference participants:
“Porn is lovely, sex is messy. Talking about innovation is lovely, innovating is messy ”
“Know your numbers”
“Ideas like buses, next one will come”
“Something for everybody is something for nobody”
“The safest thing to take the risk”
“Social media is garbage”
“Don't take your business”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/228205/
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