Well another Fixathon is behind us and I wanted to take a few minutes to recap this past weekend for posterity. The goal here is to give a window into the experience for those who are considering attending a future event to get a feel for what goes on at these things.
Here’s our photogenic crew from Saturday:
Thirty-six people in all came together to answer the question: Can we change the world in a weekend?
By the numbers we had 14 participants, 4 judges, 6 feedback volunteers, 7 subject matter experts, 2 staff, 2 angel investors and 3 nocode builders. It takes a village!
We started at 10am and followed a similar format as last one beginning with an ice breaker game called “Half Baked” (lifted from Startup Weekend) as a exercise to get everyone comfortable pitching with a low-stakes improv comedy type game.
We then went through gated steps of problem and project selection, team formation, idea refinement.
From 11am to noon our mentors/angel investors walked the room giving feedback and encouraging the teams to meet with subject matter experts who could help them in the areas where they most needed help (brand strategy, business model, legal, financial, product-market fit, etc).
This was our first time trying this idea of creating a mini services economy in the room gamified with poker chips and pseudo cap tables for each project so that we could track the value exchange amongst participants and projects.
We broke for lunch shortly after noon and enjoyed pizza from our food sponsor Pagely. If you know a colleague who has a high-traffic, high-criticality WordPress website that absolutely cannot go down, send them to Pagely for their hosting.
After lunch Lucia helped with a brief workshop on how to rapidly create a clickable mockup of a proposed application using the free tool MarvelApp.
Teams prepared for their customer feedback interviews and at 3pm they were on zoom calls and meeting in-person (thanks Annabel, Monica, Nina, Florian, Kristin!) to get prospective users’ input on their proposed apps.
From 4pm-5pm teams honed their pitches incorporating what they learned from the user interviews to create their pitch decks and presentations for the panel of VC’s we had as judges.
At 5:30 the teams one by one took to the stage to give their demos and pitches to the judges. We then got everyone back up for a second round wherein the judges made offers “Shark Tank-style” to select teams with the play money of the event.
Here are all the decks and mockups from the pitches with the final “valuations” of each:
#1 DistrictC : deck mockup 92k FIXR
#2 FamScam : deck 57k FIXR
#3 Charity Coin : deck 28k FIXR
#4 ImpacTrip : deck mockup 20k FIXR
Only Cats : mockup no offer / no valuation
Flood : deck no offer / no valuation
After the pitches I unveiled the big feature I’ve been building for the platform which is the software equivalent to what we were doing in the room with poker chips and paper cap tables:
I’m close to deploying this feature and the idea is to load in all the trades from the event so that projects who want to continue working have a lineage of contributions and a basis for forming a DAO if they wanted to turn it into a real entity and continue with it.
That ended things for Saturday night.
Sunday a handful of us returned at 10am to attempt to build the winning pitch’s idea.
DistrictC won the competition by having the highest valuation of any team (find the cap tables here in our Discord). The idea was ambitious in scope and proposed to address neighborhood gentrification by creating a public goods type funding foundation that could keep locals in their homes via a creative fractionalized ownership investing model. Unfortunately we determined building this was both beyond the scope of what we could realistically pull off in a day and there were questions around how to do it in a way that complied with the “everything open sourced” spirit of the event. We settled instead on working towards creating an interactive informational site to show compelling gentrification data for Lisbon and then guide each segment to a contact form that would enable us to followup with them for interviews. You can find that ongoing effort here.
I have a bunch of observations and takeaways from the event (5 pages of hand-written notes here in our Discord). I’ll elaborate on those in the forthcoming monthly progress report blog post I’m about to do for November.
It was yet another amazing event made possible by all the volunteers who came together to pull this off. Huge shoutout to 42 Lisboa for letting us use their wonderful space again, Build Up Labs and Pro Nocoders for the build support on Sunday.
If you want to join at a future event or apply to be the one to bring this effort to your city create an account on Problemattic and we’ll be in touch. Until next time…