When my wife and I were planning to move to Hawaii in October, one of the first things I did was look up the startup communities, hubs, and events on Oahu. After settling in and arriving, I bought my designer pass to Startup Weekend Honolulu as a good introduction to meet some new people and build something cool over a 54 hour time period.
After taking the Pali from Kailua over to Honolulu, I found parking and made my way upstairs to check-in. When I looked up, there was ~150 entrepreneurs standing in the presentation area at The Protohub ready to get started. To my surprise there were 34 different pitches with a variety of ideas across all industries.
One idea resonated more with me that was pitched by iOS developer, Adam Smith. The idea was called snacks and it was an app that you could pull up during your downtime and learn something useful.
After talking with Adam about his vision and initial thoughts for the app I decided to join the team.
After teams were set, we headed over to BoxJelly to define our workspace for the weekend and got to work right away with concepts, ideas, and trying to identify what our MVP was going to be. We used a Google forms survey with 3 short questions to collect feedback from our network of friends and connections online.
Snacks puts cutting edge knowledge about Startup Law, Marketing, Design, Development & more all at your fingertips. We focus on creating short enriching content that's easily digested and remembered.
Using Sketch & Marvel, I designed & prototyped our application during the day on Saturday so we could gather feedback at the night market and continue to validate our concept.
The concept on the left was installed on our phones and handed to users being interviewed to navigate through the application. Users said they'd pay anywhere from $1 to $100/month depending on how good the content was.
You can view it full screen and also send it to your phone to view it in context here: http://marvl.in/55d301
Our alpha iOS app is ready to ship but isn’t completely ready with digestible content. We have a handful of smaller pivots that we think will make the app more targeted & valuable.
The biggest pivot is creating micro-apps that target specific niches and applications/technologies. For example, we're creating apps focused on StartupSnacks, SketchSnacks, DesignSnacks, RubySnacks, Fair Go etc. This makes them more useful and valuable to users and the content could be sponsored and curated from industry experts more efficiently.
Sign up at snacksapp.co to get updates on our pivots, get access to our eventual betas and stay updated. Connect with snacks on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
Overall the weekend was a success! We didn't end up placing but I think we didn't convey the value of our app enough as well as our plans for how we generate content and revenue. I had a great time hustling with my team and met some great people both on my team and off. I'm definitely looking forward to get more tapped into the startup community while we're in Hawaii.
Leave a comment below or Tweet @averbs and let me know what you think of our app and progress throughout the weekend. Thanks for reading!
