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| Mr. Christopher Star , VP of Regional Digital Marketing at Paktor |
The initial pitches of the participants of the Startup Weekend Manila held at the De La Salle University have been made and now teams have been formed for their respective products or startups.
The different tracks chosen by the teams had their respective resource persons/speakers. And these talks were held at the DLSU Engineering building.
It was divided into Non-Tech/Marketing; Design; and Developers. This covers the gamut of strategic components for the startups. Coming from industry leaders and the academe, the lecturers/speakers conveyed basic lessons on how to approach having a startup and making the best possible decisions for the startups to get off the ground.
As in the previous night’s mentorship talks, they emphasized on finding the problem/s shared by a target market. This is crucial in determining and formulating the right product. Also, the testing phase and measuring phase of each startup development cycle was emphasized again.
The main point has always been do not assume solutions. The participants were taught on how to listen and empathize with their potential market or customers.
The speakers also did not spare any chance to reinforce that knowing people, where they are coming from with their concerns and that the most effective way of finding out is to encourage them to tell their stories. That will be the jump-off point for developing, creating and implementing solutions that will be marketable for the startups.
With regards to Design, there was a mini-workshop conducted wherein the participants were made to design a wallet for a potential customer. Then it was evaluated if it fits what the customer needed. The lesson learned was that one must find out what the contents of the customer’s wallet are before designing a wallet for the customer. This was done by Mr. Phil Smithson, a Software Engineer.
Ms. Ace Gapuz of Blogapalooza, Inc. and Mr. Christopher Star presented marketing strategies. What are the most important aspects in having a successful product. Again, People made the most important factor in any marketing campaign. But again, failure is to be expected so the product or service that any startup offers must be subject to metrics and validation of data obtained while the product is being tested or initially offered.
The Mentorship Period begins in the afternoon and mentors will be available for 15 minutes per team since there are 14 teams participating.
The teams will then prepare their pitches to be presented on February 19, 2017.
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