010 - From Concept To Code, The Hackathon Way
Let's start by talking about the giant elephant in the room - yes, I missed sending out a newsletter last week. If you read my previous newsletter, you'll know I hadn't anticipated getting into the On Deck Fellowship (ODF) 2 weeks ago, and as a result things got a little busy.
One of the exciting things that happened last week was an ODF Hackathon. It felt good to flex my creative skills and get back into the hackathon life. I wrote a pretty indepth post about the hackathon.
Here are some of the key takeaways I wanted to share (some of these didn't make it to the blog post):
- Hackathons are a great opportunity to push yourself out of your comfort zone and work on a project or idea that you've been meaning to get around to, or play with some tools you haven't had a chance to use yet.
- Pick a great group of people to work with - you'll be working pretty closely with them for the hackathon
- Pick folks with different skills i.e. PM, Designer, Developers with frontend/backend skills.
- Make use of existing products, solutions and open source code to get your idea up and running
- You're being judged on what you can show, so make sure you spend some time on what it looks like at the end
Working on this hackathon was a great reminder that you don't need to have everything working perfectly. This translates well to building the MVP for your startup. Yes, there are many things you should get right, however for early user testing and prototypes (i.e. without using real data) you can follow the fake it till you make it mantra and use fake data to simulate the real experience.
Hopefully this little reminder will give me the little push I need to actually push out a testable version of my app this week and start getting some feedback. If you're interested in testing it out, definitely get in touch!
Find Me Online / Events I'm Attending
CrowdCast Venture Deals: AMA with David Cohen
New Blog Posts
From Concept to Code - the Hackathon Way where I share my hackathon Journey building Duka, an African version of Shopify.
Features to Improve Your Apps Safety During the Login Flow dives into some simple changes you can make in order to improve your apps safety against brute force attacks. I'm looking at writing a follow up post on the pros and cons of different login systems like 2FA, magic links, MFA etc. Feel free to join the conversation on Twitter.
Little Plugs
LunchClub - a great way to network and meet other folks online. It's currently invite only, this link is an invite. I've met a lot of incredible people through lunchclub already.
Billion Dollar Startup Ideas posts a new startup idea everyday and was started by @MichaelBervell. He also offers free consultations on startup ideas!
Startup Investory Matching Tool launched by @lolitataub and @josh_taub matches founders to investors
Reflections on Being a Female Founder where the former CEO of PlanGrid shares her story as a founder. This is a must read.