Last week at Startup Weekend Lagos, I met 56 people who wanted to build a better world by creating businesses that solved local problems affecting millions of people everyday.
They let go of any inhibition, and they worked hard to bring their idea to life in 54 hours.
Imagine for a second that you had 54 hours with no room for fear or inhibition to work hard, make mistakes, and be helped by selfless coaches to set you on the right track. It could be hard to imagine but I believe this is what makes Startup Weekend special.
18 ideas were pitched and 9 teams formed; each with a unique value proposition to validate, build, and sell over the weekend.
There has never been a Startup Weekend Lagos that had it this close — with great ideas and great execution, the selection of winners by the judges was not going to be an easy one.
But at the end three teams emerged as winners:
Flowbyte
Makes flow monitoring devices focused on the petroleum sector — If it flows they’ll help you monitor it.
Under the hood: 3D printing, Ardruino, IoT
Contact: @CaptainUnibrow
Chota
Snap to buy fashion eCommerce app — solving the problem of fashion envy one snap at a time.
Under the hood: Image processing algorithm, fashion eCommerce resource indexing
Contact: @don_nonito
Grablot
Crowd investing platform for real estate — Invest in Real Estate or raise money for property development.
Under the hood: finance and investment deals for property, pre-development property listings.
Contact: @Moballer_Banks
The other teams were:
T-Box: An on demand T-shirt printing service
Under the hood: DIY T-shirt designing, Printing and Logistics
Contact: @tboxng
Kolè: Turns trash into cash
Under the hood: Rewards, data, and resource analytics
Contact: @KoleApp
Strabi: A serendipitous location based interest discovery
Under the hood: location based business listings, maps, and prompts
LukAround: A location aware interest based social network — bringing back the social experience to social network.
Under the hood: location based interest and people listings
contact: @lukarounder
Talent Hail: Connects students to businesses for internship placement and micro work.
Under the hood: skill verification system for student interns
Easy Travel: Cashless payment product for mass transit.
under the hood: NFC and barcode based offline payment, commute data and analytics
Special thanks to all the judges, coaches and local sponsors that helped bring Startup Weekend Lagos 2015 to life.
