Jigar’D

Many people want to do a startup. Many people want to create an app. Many people have ideas.

A lot of that creativity gets wasted. Life catches up with you. Work catches up. There are always important pressing immediate matters.

In 50 hours is an interesting experiment. In the metaphorical sense, it is an opportunity to hit the hard gravel road without leaving home.

Can you deliver? Should you do this? What will people think? Is there a future in this? In50hours allowed you to answer these questions and more.

Organised by Dorai Thodla and Vijay Anand. In a way In50Hours itself is a beta test. They are trying to start a centre – the startup centre around which startups of chennai can revolve.  Like a startup, the startup centre itself doesn’t fully know what it will become … Will it be Incubation space, Meeting space, Inspiration place or all that and more ?

The event started on Day 0 with a pitch . The participants asked to keep it to 3 slides, 3 minutes. The ideas were from all over. Education seemed liked a hot space. From social and mobile to medicine. A lot of different areas were covered. Some of the pitch-ers seemed to make that dreaded mistake – they had not looked at competition (or were in denial) . Competition as explained by a mentor is not a reason to stop you from doing something. My view is that competition should make you concentrate more on differentiation. Anyway  I was surprised at the number of people who weren’t coders and were looking for coders to get their idea developed. What was nice is that some people found them also.

Some of the standout ideas were Balaji Sowmyanarayan with his dead simple customer service tool. Call a number, leave a complaint (or a praise) Transcription would be provided for quick filtering. Shankar Narayan’s Whatsup.in was personally very appealing. The idea was to figure out whats happening in the city quickly (and something I really wanted to develop and never got around to ) Kailash’s collaborative SMS spam filter had legs. 6 persona was an attempt to cut out on social media spam.  The students however stole the show. The ebullient yuvipanda with his website to settle the eternal engineering college dillema … Is my college worse than yours ? Two student teams wanted a website to share notes  (One of them seem to be getting some traction too)

Day 1 showed some consolidation. It looked like the interesting ideas got people joining in, some ideas were dropped, some pivoted. The nice thing was that there were people to help around with stuff. The mentors with idea validation, UI designers were in heavy demand. Product Designers/Managers also helped too. The QA team however got less love. Early startups dont want to test. They know their product is messed up … Day 1 had a lot of people burning the midnight oil as opposed to Day 0. I worked most of the night and got some serious help from Prasanna and Russel.

Day 2 was the demo day. Some people were ready, some not so much. It was sad that some people did not demo, Even though they had something set up … Showing somebody else your baby is always hard !

The demos were generally good. Many people had got to a working prototype. Most interestingly Senthil Nayagam took over his teams app which was not in ship shape and delivered it .. In 4 hours to boot ! Heroku and Rails power showing … Siddharth of  Tools for Agile fame did the same with the customer service number app. His blog post is telling.

I got a good response for my simplifier app . I ran it on a bunch of phones to boot and thankfully all the phones survived ! Some people wanted something like this which is idea validation indeed !  It was even more relevant because we got featured in the business line today. The last line was about a mobile app, which as it turns out is what many of our new users wanted. Thanks to In50Hours we can ship this quickly.

Most importantly I hope people realized the power of simplicity. Building a minimum viable product forces you to work only on features which matter  and cut out everything else. Crap gets thrown out quickly.

It will be interesting to see where the products go from here. 6persona which is grand in scope was not done yet. Although it moved forward significantly. Kailash and Russel’s spam app is something I am looking foward to… The expense tracker is an interesting idea. As for WhatsHappening … I hope to work on taking some time off and doing it …And for The Startup Centre it looks like it has a great future…

So what did I learn from in 50 hours … Chennai’s got ideas … and talent …