Startup Weekend Yields Connections, Industry Knowledge and Teamwork
Date: December 12, 2022
Time: 3:22
By Ashley Guernsey
The fast and energetic Anchorage Startup Weekend was a great way to kick off Alaska’s Startup Week — a week of virtual and in-person events hosted around the state to share opportunities available to entrepreneurs, small businesses, and innovators. Social and networking events introduced startup ecosystem builders to people interested in entrepreneurship.
Startup Weekend, a Techstars entrepreneurial training program, allows people to immerse themselves in the startup life for a weekend. In the process participants gain and practice skills like team building, networking, and market analysis.
Center ICE’s Arctic Fellow Ashley Guernsey attended Startup Weekend, “Everyone had the opportunity to pitch an idea in 60 seconds, which was a fun opportunity to share any idea with the group,” said Guernsey. “About 30 people, including myself, shared ideas at Anchorage’s Startup Weekend.”
The goal was to form teams around ideas attendees would like to work on in the remaining 53 hours. Guernsey joined a team focused on developing a small-scale supplemental power device for deployment in rural villages.
It is important to not become too attached to your initial idea because you might be forced to pivot.
“Originally, we were working on building a microgrid in a box after we priced out components and reached competitors,” said Guernsey. “We discovered another company that was already producing a similar product and the product we were creating would be out of our potential customers' price range.”
While they were exploring the technical aspects of developing their prototype, Guernsey and her team were also engaged in the customer discovery process. “We reached out to experts at Alaska Center for Energy and Power, friends, supply companies, other startups we could partner with, and more.”
Through customer discovery the team found the more critical component of their project was building a battery which could be used as a backup power generation source, and that maintenance of existing infrastructure was a key problem in Alaska’s rural communities.
“Something that surprised me was that our coaches advised us that our product did not need to be totally different and new. It could simply incorporate new elements or be optimized for a particular market,” added Guernsey.
In their final pitch for the weekend, the battery Guernsey and her team worked on was on a much smaller scale and comparable to other products in the market optimized to their customers' needs in rural Alaska.
The workshops throughout the weekend provided expert advice and inspiring and relevant information from entrepreneurs and experts from the Alaskan Startup Community.
“The most valuable part of the weekend was not just the project specific knowledge I gained, but the skills I learned, and connections made,” said Guernsey.
If you missed Startup Week click here to watch webinars produced by Alaska Center ICE and partners where you can hear from innovators on their customer discovery journey, how seed funding supports new ideas, and new opportunities from those in Cordova and the surrounding region.