Turn Your Hack into a Business – Elena Sinelnikova

Transcript

hey how many of y'all hockey in the audience want to nobody sure so for you actually we have the acceleration chart just the idea competition but today we're going to be talking about from your hack into a business I am the founder of the chicks organization and we organize hackathons all over the world and last year we open the program that we that helped the hackers to turn their hacks into business and

I'm going to talk about steps that help you to make it happen that's our you have discussed evaluate research test and execute it's all start from there happy if you are happy in this weekend you would have a grand time because usually how it works for the hackathon you come you find your team or you come with your team already then you cover that come up with the idea you have the whole weekend you present you win then you go skiing but after that what is happening after that you go back to your nine-to-five job or you have the

other option to take your half and turn it into a business but first before you do it you need to check with your team whether they want to do it with you or you're on your own and sometimes they say no which is great you can now you have all the freedom in the world you can turn your hack into your business on your own or if they say yes and you have a team with you to work through all the steps also what are we seeing in our hackathons sometime they say yes but then they fall off the back end and you feel on your own sometime they go and do

it on their own and you have a competitor about 30% of the teams don't make it together after you decide who you will be doing it with you go ahead and evaluate your house and first thing you do you check if you have a focus so ask yourself a question can I describe what my up - and who is this exactly for in one sentence for example we had to grow Maria who they they a baton and she didn't work she an application that tracks donations

so when she was going through this steps he decided that she will be doing the nation's only for the sick kids why is it important to have a focus because when you start marketing application you have to market it to the specific audience if you don't have specific audience that cares about this problem if you not have this audience it will be really hard to market and it is harder to sell need checkmark you have to have at least 20 means of the businesses or people who would buy your the application committee who would need to

use the application and want to pay you money why is it important because some time we have an idea but then it turns out that it's our idea and that is all we care about but other people they don't care and especially they don't want to pay money for it some people would use your app but just feel free that doesn't count okay so you need to have people who exactly need that and whose pain you are solving for example Maria she happened to be on a group on social media where she talks to people and she has an entire thread of people that expressed

the need to have their donation tracker on the blockchain or at least to have some visibility of how the understand next one is a scale need to ask yourself can my app serve to a million users potentially or can one transaction make me $1,000,000 for example Marie's app is on the etherium blockchain which is decentralized and potentially can serve to millions of people why is it important because at some point you need to grow your business and if you cannot grow if you say that you serve only 220

hundred or even thousand people it becomes a job not a business and we don't need jobs we're built in the businesses next o'clock is a control if your app completely independent of any single business a person of platform for example Maria she again she had her app on the etherium blockchain which is completely decentralized and not controlled by any single party we know lots of businesses that were based on somebody else's platform or business for example Facebook Ads there are lots of businesses that emerged their base for

the Facebook ads but can you imagine if he of the Facebook make a decision overnight to remove all the ads from the Facebook where this business is going to go down the drain so you have to always think that you have control over your business next should point the money you need to ask yourself how can your app can reliably and steadily bring the money in and the money in this case is not a greedy thing because you need a fuel for your business and without the Silvius your business will not even work so example maria she decided to charge a

transaction fee from each transaction there for shipping and steadily income happy from each transaction four million transaction today will make her million dollars and the next checkpoint is an advantage you have to ask yourself whether you have some upper hand in the business that will help you to control your competitors it means that if you have some advantage your competitors cannot touch you for example Maria works in United Way for launch and she knows the business engines out

there for competitors that come in later on cannot take her off that easily after you're done with the evaluation you do your research and you research your competitors you know sometimes when you have an idea they say oh there's somebody already doing that which is actually great because because if you find no competitors no people that doing that it means that there is no market for you down or if you find you lots of competition it means that maybe market is too saturated and then it will be

really hard for you to go forward if you find just a few competitors this is the sweet spot where you can start actually researching what did you how they do it and how you can make it better how you can take the business from them and what your competitive advantage is after you done all that it's time to test but this is not a unit test or system faster even penetration test this is a market test you take your prototype and you take it to this 20 people that you identified in a step to any make a sale if you make a sale it's great it

means that you succeeded and hit your check your teeth marks everything is correctly but if you didn't only need to do not to panic and just go back to the step one and reevaluate with this somewhere there down the road if you made a mistake it can be easily corrected and you try all the steps again and finally you can come to the execution step which in fact contains millions of steps inside it you have to raise money do your white paper all the fancy website and marketing associations kpi's the growth everything there some people go to the step right away and

start spending money and that's where they fail before the evaluation of research if you go to the step there is a better chance to fail if all the steps that you had for you there are programs for the startup that take you in and help you business that incubators accelerators mentorship programs though all of all of them have the prerequisites you have to have something already either built or tested or in some way you have to have an a business established business that can bring them money and as I said outcome from critics treachery we gather especially for the

hackathon teams so we take the hack and accelerated to your entire business without the four milestones to keep you on track we have a pool of mentors who every every day they have they check on you and they invite you every day in the telegram groups we have an in-person events which brings all of the projects together to share the experience our weekly workshops that educate your and Ola on lines of businesses and also we help you with the funding check it out with the chicks go see a hatchery and we walk you through all the steps have

discussed evaluate research test and execute oh and this slide is my smart team good always because this is our event in in this year so please check us out at 36:38 we have an event in dubai coming up in karachi in vienna nassau bahamas and of course our annual event in Toronto may 29 2015 14 mm in a let's say - interpretive dossier our team will answer those odds Alton actress is on Twitter a triptych

and the score chicks so thank you and happy happy [Music] you [Music]