Startup Weekend Brisbane | Creative Tech

Last weekend, I took part in the QUT organised Startup Weekend for Creative Tech. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has a large stake in the creative industries space. They host the Coterie, a co-working space geared towards creatives. QUT also has a Creative Enterprise department that runs accelerators for creative people. So I had high expectations going into the weekend. But it did not go well. My team slowly disintegrated, I got food poisoning and missed all of Sunday. But I did manage to make one contact at the event that might lead to something. So that's something!

Reflecting on the weekend, the first red flag was when the organisers couldn't quite define what they meant by "creative startups" and fell back on the old gem "no banking".  To be fair, no one looks at banking and thinks "creative", and if they do, it usually starts and stops with "creative accounting" which is illegal and has tanked the world economy enough times - thank you very much! But I still expected a bit of a better definition from the organisers of the creative tech startup weekend.

The next thing that didn't quite work as intended was that in their zeal, the organisers got everybody present to pitch. So there were 90 participants. About 40 to 50 were already pitching, but the organiser encouraged everyone to pitch. It was a great idea on paper, but a terrible idea when the dinner and free networking finished at 7 PM and the venue was going to close at 10 PM. We didn't start voting on the pitches until 9:30 PM and that wasn't a lot of time to mingle and form groups.

Despite this, I left Friday night thinking I was in a good group with a clear idea to spend the weekend working on a startup for a medical IoT device. I came back on Saturday to find that no, apparently the team wasn't on the same page and we were going to build a fashion IoT device. That wouldn't be too bad except that fashion IoT device was something that sounds cool, but no one would buy. I demonstrated clearly to my group that the idea wasn't viable, but I fell into a circular argument because one of my teammates was completely married to his idea and just wouldn't accept reality. I should have heeded the red flag and left the team. But I perversely tried to make the best of the situation. But, there is a reason why the wisdom in the startup space is to bail when you think you should bail.

Anyway, I didn't get a lot of out of the weekend, and after I got food poisoning, I pretty much left what remained of my team in the lurch on Sunday. All and all, I think I'll sit out for the other weekend-long commitments for awhile.

Codebots: Build code with the help of AI

Last week, I kept up my pattern of going to random events that show up on my Eventbrite recommendation page. So I found myself at the Festive Founders Mingle and Jingle, which was hosted by Brisbane AI and included a talk by Dr Eban Escott, the founder of Codebots.

Codebots is an AI that, as the name suggests, writes code with the particular focus on "low-code".

From their website, "Codebots is on a mission to help humans team up with code-writing bots to plan, design, build and launch awesome software to the cloud. We are a Brisbane-based technology startup taking on the global giants in the billion dollars low-code industry. On the platform, 92.68% (on average) of the software’s code is written by a codebot and the remaining percentage is completed by a human. Collaborating with a codebot means quicker software delivery times, higher quality applications but most importantly, the team spends less time coding and more time creating."

Codebots is an interesting concept. I mean, Scala was developed to cut down on the number of lines of code you had to write in Java. Certainly, there is nothing fun about writing 90% of the codebase since it's pretty generic and bog standard. So this certainly has potential but it also begs the question if the recent focus on pushing students towards STEM is a good idea. The future of works is complex and codebots shows that AI will disrupt software engineering the same way it is disrupting every other industry.

For my part, I have signed up for the codebots beta. I hope I am selected because it sounds like a fun thing new skill to learn. Besides, AI co-workers do not smell.

My Startup Weekend Experience

Last weekend I took part in Brisbane's Startup Weekend 2017. I went in blind. Not only had I never attended a Startup Weekend before, but I also have never even heard of it and bought my tickets after only a cursory reading of the promotional page. The event came to my notice while the early bird ticket price was still active and I figured $60 was cheap enough for me just to go along and see what the weekend was about. I am very glad I did! Because the weekend was not only great fun, but I feel I learnt a lot about the whole Startup process and I feel more connected to the Brisbane startup scene.

I pitched Kids Exp - it got some votes but not enough!

The Weekend started Friday night when we got an introduction to the concept and asked to pitch ideas. The ideas had to be pre-prototype. It was okay if you had thought long and hard about them and even did some market research. But if you had a prototype or a minimum viable product that was already on the market, you couldn't pitch.

I pitched a modified version of the idea behind Route 17 as Kids Experience. My idea was that when you have kids, you don't have a lot of time or energy to research and plan activities to do with the kids. So even if you have a chunk of time to spend with the kids, you might just end up watching TV because you are too exhausted to think of something else. So why not make an app that helps you plan and execute activities to do with your kids, before your kids start thinking you are uncool very quickly, even if you are Batman! 

The latter was a bit of an inside joke for anyone reading the current crop of DC comics. But in retrospect, it was too much of an inside joke. Also in retrospect, the name was not great. There were something like 30 to 40 pitches, you needed something that rolled off the tongue or some other way to be memorable. If I attend another weekend and pitch again, I'll definitely pitch both an easier concept to transmit in the short time with a memorable name that sticks with you.

I still could have tried to recruit people to my idea, but I opted to join another team. One of the other ideas that struck me as good and practical was the concept of renting out your home office space. Sort of like an Airbnb for home offices. So I ended up joining Shared Space! The name was supposed to be a placeholder, but we never ended up finding another name that we liked more. So Shared Space stuck around.

Shared Space team with our first space sharer!

Shared Space Front Page

Over the weekend we first put together a Google form survey to gauge if there was a market for the idea. It turns out there was a niche for people who did experience the loneliness and isolation of working from home but were too far away from formal co-working spaces like the ones I covered in the previous post. A lot of people, it seems would appreciate a cheaper and more local option. Also, there are people who live too far from all available co-working spaces.

It was less about renting a space, and more about forming a community that would help lessen the feeling of isolation and might also help maintain focus, increasing accountability etc. However, for some people, it was about the space because either their home offices lacked amenities such as air conditioning or they just needed to go somewhere else from time to time.

Shared Space Team Making Final Pitch

I think we did good work and made a great final pitch to the judges. But we didn't place. I suspect we should have spent more time developing our business plan and also putting in some more features that helped to differentiate us from existing competitors in the space. Still, I think the idea has legs, and my team might go ahead with the concept. The lady who originally pitched the concept is sleeping on it and will decide to proceed or not soon.

For my part, I am going ahead exploring collaboration opportunities with people I met over the weekend. I had a meeting lined-up on Wednesday, but it fell through. But I have another meeting scheduled for Friday. Let's hope that goes well and I get some great collaborations coming out of the weekend.

React Native

It's almost time for the monthly meet-up of the Women Who Code group. Last month was all about React Native. I enjoyed the intro and I am looking forward to this month's topic of "Hacking your career: tips and tricks for the job market".

Meetup: App Marketing

This year, my New Year's resolution was simply to be more social because I have been very neglectful of my friends, family and industry peers. To that end, I have signed up for a number of groups on Meetup and actually attending meetups for groups I had already signed up for. One of the new meetup I joined is a monthly meetup is Brisbane iOS/Android App Marketing Meetup that aims to teach members about how to market apps. The meetup itself is new and had its first ever meeting last Wednesday.

We had two guest speakers for the first meeting and we also got a presentation from a member. It was all very instructive. For example, it never occurred to me that Facebook Ads might be the most cost effective due to how well you could customise it. Also, hearing things from the point of the view of the marketers explained a number of things I had been observing regarding online ads. I got some good tips that slotted in well with what I was already learning from studying up on SEO marketing. But I'll talk about SEO marketing on a separate post.

I would say that my apps are still a bit off before it is worth me running a paid campaign for them. But hopefully, by the time I do. I will be able to run a good targeted campaign that offers a good return on investment.