I did it! I completed the MIT Bootcamp! It was tough because we were working from 8 AM to 2 AM from Sunday to Thursday, with a solid eight hours to begin with on Saturday and finishing off with 4 hours of pitches on Friday. The long days started to take it toil, but I am happy to say that my team and I stuck to our vow to follow the process of disciplined entrepreneurship. I am happy with what we accomplished during the week, and whatever happens from now, I’ll always be a Bootcamp Alumni! But let’s start from the beginning!

Day 1 - Saturday

The first day started with all the Bootcamp members gathering for a late afternoon tea, meeting each other and alumni from previous iterations of the Bootcamp.

We had a brief opening ceremony featuring speakers from QUT, MIT and the Government. The highlight of the opening was the welcome from the Nunukul Yuggera Aboriginal Dance Company. I didn’t take any photos, but there are plenty on social media for those who want it!

There was a change in how groups formed this year. The alumni tell me that in previous years they had to pitch their ideas to each other and recruit team members, which is what happens at Startup Weekends.

However, this year, we were assigned groups with the criteria that every group had a woman, and there was as much mix of nationalities and background as possible. My group consisted of,

Pascal Seibold - From Germany, but he recently moved to Sydney
Manish Pahwa - From Melbourne
Maria Susana Benitez (Su) - From Ecuador
Michael Frangos - From right here in Brisbane

I loved my team, and we had a lot of fun. We didn’t have big arguments or fallout. I hear that without storming groups often fall short of producing their best work. Maybe that’s true but we came to the Bootcamp to learn the process of disciplined entrepreneurship, and I think we learned the process better because we weren’t at each other throats. The week was stressful enough without interpersonal drama.

Day 2 - Sunday

Saturday was supposed to have an early stop at 11 PM. But we went overtime by two hours and that extra time spent in the lectures took an early toil on me on Sunday when we started the program in earnest. Our day started with lectures from Bill Aulet himself during the day, followed by teamwork from dinner until 2 PM. My team agreed that we would follow the process and not get caught trying to fast track the tasks. So, on Sunday, we spent considerable time generating ideas, taking time to vote for ideas to narrow down our list to three, before conducting the “five whys” exercise with the top three.

The easiest to wrap our head around idea was one about shoes. But our coach suggested we should pick something a little more abstract so that we were forced to undertake the process. So instead, we choose a very abstract problem related to productivity, and our problem statement ended up being,

Young professionals are not productive and struggle to focus; they are frustrated at their lack of control. They experience 7 interruptions per hour, this results in 58% of the entire work day being spent on interruptions. To deal with this, these young professionals currently use productivity apps such as trello, brainFM, Pomodoro, Microsoft project, etc. despite the fact that these “solutions” are adding to the disruptions.

I was struggling a lot as the night progressed. So my team kindly let me go home early. It was only a few extra hours of sleep but it set me up for the rest of the week!

Day 3 - Monday

We again started with lectures from Bill. It was also the day we had our first guest speaker, former South Sydney Rabbitohs Player Trent Young, who is the current CEO of Young Guns. We had more team time on Monday because we had to go out and talk to humans to do our primary market research. We then compiled our research into a persona we wanted to target. Our persona did change during the week, but that’s a good thing.

I am happy to report that for a change, I stepped out of my comfort zone, and did some interviews too! In previous Startup Weekends, I stayed in my corner and opted not to talk to humans. But if there is one thing I learnt from the weekend, to ensure you are solving problems for paying customers, you do have to talk to humans. Speaking of which, I am yet to finish reading the book “Talking to Humans”, but I will!

Day 4 - Tuesday

Our second guest speaker was Alison Price of Soilcyclers, who had an interesting and different entrepreneurial journey. She started the company to get work for her husband, then her boyfriend, and it grew from there.

Tuesday was also the last day we had with Bill Aulet, and for me it was a bit of joggling act because I was down for two networking events, one for the MIT Bootcamp and the other for Impact Boom Elevate+ (more on that in a different post). Tuesday was also the first day my team did our elevator pitches. So that was also something I wanted to be there to support. There was a lot of Ubers involved but in the end, I managed to be everywhere I needed to be!

Day 5 - Wednesday

Wednesday started early with a fancy sit down breakfast with the Alumni from previous Bootcamps. Most of them were locals, but there were a few who flew in to attend. I think that shows the power of the Bootcamp network.

I found the discussion with the alumni very illuminating. I was intrigued to find out the even when the alumni didn’t start their own business; they were able to apply the process of disciplined entrepreneurial to their everyday jobs.

Our guest speaker for Wednesday was the very inspirational Eleanor Carey, who rowed the ocean as part of an all-female crew. Her’s was also the last guest lecture I attended as I opted to skip the morning lecturers on Thursday on account of having a client meeting at lunch.

Wednesday was also my turn to be the CEO, I should have mentioned that the role of CEO rotated among all members throughout the week, and I marshalled my team away from cake and alcohol to deliver the customer acquisition strategy and the associated cost calculations. We were one person done because one of my team members was in intense pain, and so we sent them to the hotel early!

Day 6 - Thursday

I had a late start on Thursday but joined my team as we start team time. But there was some afternoon time dedicated to a panel discussion on team and culture for startups. I should mention that the coaches hosted a number of workshops on things like pitching, business modelling for social enterprises and interview techniques for primary market research. I don’t remember what day which workshop was one. It’s all blending together at the moment.

Once all the workshops were done, it was just full on pitch practice, and pitch deck creation. We also formally named ourselves Hiper! All credit for out beautiful looking pitch deck goes to my team member Su. Manish was the CEO for the last day. He did an excellent job of keeping us focused. We tried very hard to have a strong emotive element to our pitch, but we weren’t dealing with burnout but productivity. That’s more brain and process, and heart and emotion. Our inability to figure out a way to tug at the heartstrings was unfortunate because we knew were going to be up again two very emotive pitches in the finals. But sometimes you do the best with what you have, and not pretend to be something you are not.

Day 7 - Pitch Day Friday!

Pitch day arrived, and Team Hiper did an excellent job if I say so myself. All of us had to do a section. I took our secret sauce section, the team section and the ask. I managed to finish exactly on the bell. So I was super happy with my pacing on the day. We were not among the eight teams selected to pitch a second time in front of a fresh set of judges and a general audience. Nevertheless, we were happy with our performance as a whole.

Our shortcoming was that we couldn’t generalise our solution so that the older gentlemen who judged us would understand why our solution would work with young men of a certain type. That’s an important lesson on messaging. For real pitches, practice in front of as diverse a crowd as you can!

Day 7 - Conclusion

After the pitch, we had a three-course lunch at Howard Smith Wharves. At lunch, every table had previous alumni, and my table’s alumni was Mark Phigram who used his Bootcamp experience to launch the Travelling Dads startup as a side gig. He is not interested in turning Travelling Dads into his full-time job. I think that’s something a lot of us forgot, our ventures don’t have to become our full-time careers. Sometimes people want that, but more often, they are content to have something apart from their 9 to 5.

Drinks organised by the Brisbane alumni group followed lunch. Most of the Bootcampers somehow had the energy to keep partying on! But I ended-up crashing at the hotel. I spent most the last weekend sleeping. But I am recovered now, and since I moved everything I am doing as CTO into Start with Tinni, I am ready to resurrect Virgo 19 as the startup implementing my ideas as CEO.

However, I am going to take my time and do the process. My first task will be to generate at least a hundred ideas before I start filtering the list for ideas that I want to do, can do and for which there is a market. In the meantime, I hope to bring my knowledge to bear for my Start with Tinni customers as we go forward to building viable businesses that make a difference in how we live!

Lastly, even though I am a Brisbane local, I was warned to find a place close to QUT Garden’s Point campus for the duration of the Bootcamp. So, I moved into the Brisbane Sky Tower apartments for the week of the Bootcamp. This proved to be a great decision because I don’t think I would have gotten any sleep if I tried to commute from home. As it was, the ten minute walk from QUT to Brisbane Sky Tower felt like an eternity some nights. The Sky Tower was great for the most part but they are still under construction and low and behold, the two mornings I managed to sleep in a bit, I was woken early by jackhammers. That was not pleasant but I spent so little time in the apartment that it didn’t matter.

Can you spot me in QUT’s video about the MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp?