16 new services launched in 48 hours in Estonia | Hacker News Reader

16 new services launched in 48 hours in Estonia

garage48.org

25 pointsjkaljundi21 comments

I'll be honest. I find these things retarded. It'd be like sailing across the Bering Strait and announcing that'd you'd crossed the Pacific.

Something thrown together in 48 hours is not a startup; it's a website. It might be able to turn into a startup over time, and I think that would be a far more interesting statistic: how many of these "startups" are doing anything after 3 months?

I will tell you in 3 months. I was actually one of the organizers for this group of events (startup weekend and associated events were done all over the nordics last weekend and the weekend before) and I honestly don't think it's really about actually getting a startup going so much as the experience and meeting people. I do know from talking with the Startup Weekend guys in the states (Clint) that some of these actually do turn into real startups and get funded and launch but many don't. I don't think that's a problem at all, I know from my personal experience (Lund, Sweden) that is was very heavy with university students who probably weren't considering or thinking about startups at all. The event helps people become aware of the opportunities, network and meet a lot of people who might be interested in doing something. One of the things that makes it easiest (my opinion) is other people interested in starting up and knowing the right people in your region to actually get help (legal, business, investors, feedback, everything else). These types of events give that opportunity to people who might have never even thought about it otherwise. If a startup is born from the event, AWESOME. If not, what else was gained? I think quite a bit.

In Tallinn we also had a great mix of people, from high school and university students to experienced professional people. Even 2 of the Skype founders, who have written core part of that product and made hundreds of millions in exits, were in the teams, developing Garage48 software products. Not so much to create new fantastic businesses, but to hack, have fun and meet people.

Interesting fact: On quick count 14 present and former Skype staff contributed to 6 of total 16 Garage48 teams. Skype has had a great effect on Estonian startup and development culture.

That's pretty awesome, glad to hear such a great group of people got together. We had Peter Sunde the first day give a talk and he stayed for the pitches asking questions and giving feedback which was pretty fun to listen to.

See, back in the day, we just called these hackathons. I don't have any objections to what happens at these sorts of events (no doubt it's a good experience for those involved), but there's some general annoyance at them being labeled "startups" because it misrepresents the actual challenges of starting a startup, which are wholly different than what you'd encounter in such a brief timeframe. Usually the technical / design facet is the easiest component of starting a startup.

Quite often 50% of the team members is design/development, another half is marketing/biz dev. For Garage48 we had people who were doing a huge amount of stuff in those non technical areas: making real business partnerships with restaurants/bars/cafe's, handing out flyers on the streets, actually ordering manufactured soft pet toys, making deals with other non-profits or organisations, hiring external team members or roles, making sales etc.

All of this during a weekend, where they basically had to use all of their contacts and networks to get external people into work mode - and succeeded in that. So in addition to more technical software hackathons, events like Garage48 give also a lot of experience in other areas. It's correct to not call them startups, but startup seeds (startup idea is not correct either, as the events are more about execution than pure talk). May be some of those seeds will blossom or mutate into new lifeforms.

Seriously. By these standards I made a startup in three hours (three minutes on a speedrun) by buying qwertqwert.com and redirecting it to a dvorak translator.

Is it useful? It is more useful to me than most little websites, but by no stretch of imagination is it a startup. A very minimum viable product at best.

The site's own headline has the decency to call these "services" rather than "startups". Oh, that the submission-headline would be as honest!

Thanks for the suggestion, changed the title of the submission. Absolutely agree, that for now most of these are just quick projects, that might grow into real companies. Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters. These were ad hoc projects, people who met first time on Friday, many of them students. The focus was also not on businesses, but products and services, some of them non-commercial - why not. Events like these have also the goal of getting contacts and new friends and give people motivation. In that Garage48 succeeded, so many people said they are now considering doing a startup, something they never before had thought of.

Thank you! (Many of the initial comments were reacting to the word 'startup' rather than the interesting services created, so I think this wording will get more of the right kind of attention/reaction.)

True, sorry! We actually do most of our communications locally in Estonian and use different terms, which get lost in translation :)

My favourite: "Seenele - map based Facebook application to find places to get mushrooms."

They said there are huge opportunities for growth. They can expand into berries. Or fishing. The pitch and jury questions section was funny as hell. That counts.

Seriously though, as a small 4-person team they developed an impressive mobile + Facebook mapping / events / social application that can be tried out in many revenue-generating businesses. What they need to do is experiment, iterate, get mentored and find their way. There are so many opportunities where they can grow. Using mushrooms as an example does not mean that's what they actually want to do for the rest of their lives :)

I believe this quote from Paul Graham is relevant here: "Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest." http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html

Sign of a startup bubble?

As if there were not enough signs already )

A startup "bubble" is sorta always here, even in the worst of times. Because by its very nature, successful startups tend to exit with very high margins, and the occasional home run has it so high that it naturally attracts the media, and consequently investors who always hope to fund the "next Google" or the "next Skype". But we almost never hear about 99% of the startups that fail, break even or succeed modestly.

No. There are plenty signs but this isn't one of them.

If they were valued at several million, then yes.

Fun projects for mushroom fans or tracking how much parliament members attend the sessions are definitely not signs of a bubble :-)

One of the projects on the other hand made a lot of fun out of funding/exit bubble, making it their key theme: their only goal was to exit by next Friday. The first thing they did was list themselves for sale on an auction site. One of the VC's on the jury actually made a 50 cents bet on them, raising it from previous 40 cents ;) Having fun is important, not all things are dead serious.

What is the success rate of startup weekend startups?

If 2-3 of the 16 projects would turn into real businesses, we would be extremely happy. If at least half of them continue as websites or free software, that would be great as well.

Let's also not forget, that if the people are great and team works well, many of the startups find themselves doing something completely different in 1-2 years time. You just have to get started and experiment.

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