Startup Weekend in Kiev: nothing seek, nothing find

Startup Weekend took place on March 23-25 in Kiev, organized by the Glavstart Company and Arkady Moreinis. Three-day event gave rise to a great interest among the authors of the projects, and among the audience: there were 611 members and 127 projects registered on the website, according to Glavstarta.

Kiev Startup Weekend format (the partners are the YouScan company (social media monitoring system), Ukrainian Banner Network and 42 Coffee Cups) did not differ from Russian counterparts: an introductory lecture on the first day about what a startup is and what should be done to find investors, and the two subsequent days devoted to the projects that passed the preliminary selection.

During the first theoretical day, event participants could listen to an Arcady Moreinis lecture about how a startup should survive on a difficult and tortuous way of development. Moreinis also briefly described the activities of Glavstart.

According to Towave.ru portal, the spirit of Arcady’s presentation is that your brilliant ideas are not so brilliant, because you do not have enough experience.

In fact, investors are not interested in people who have just mere ideas, and there is a huge gap between these two states - ideas and investors -and only few people can get over it.

A short presentation of Igor Myslinskogo from UsabilityLab about how to determine the correct positioning of the project culminated the first day of Startup Weekend in Kiev.

The second day was organized to work with projects and ideas, so-called tubes of experts (Ukrainian online business VIPs and representatives of investment companies were the experts). Passing the "tube" the authors presented their 1-2 minutes projects to each of the experts. Not all projects have passed the test of "tubes" - approximately 35% of participants reached the final (usually it is 30-50%). They were already working projects with a customer base as well as those existing in beta version.