Creating Jumpstart: A Virtual Start-Up Competition
By: Raghava Uppuluri
Tags: Event, Students, Reflecting, Startups, Competition

The lack of perspective with developing a product with actual customers in mind made hackathon projects difficult to transition into a startup. I personally thought this was unfocused potential

Introduction

Around mid-April to the end of May, I — along with stellar co-organizers Jai Chadha, Parii Bafna, and Aditya Adara — took part in organizing Jumpstart, a virtual student tech startup competition.

Our mission is to provide an encompassing startup experience for students with varying backgrounds, from business, finance, marketing to computer science, engineering, and STEM.

We spent weeks planning, marketing, and traversing our amazing, supportive networks for mentors, judges, sponsors, and workshop hosts/panelists. For the event itself, we’re excited to say that we had 300+ sign-ups and 30+ projects submitted at our first Jumpstart event!

In this article, I hope to convey the inspiration and behind-the-scenes thinking of Jumpstart and share highlights from the event, plus cool projects students developed over the Jumpstart weekend!

Behind-the-scenes of Jumpstart

For some context about our team:

Parii is an incoming freshman at University of Minnesota, and Aditya a high school senior at Edina High School, both are co-founders of GenerationMN, which is a non-profit poised to provide students with events and experiences to build startups. They co-organized Techstars Startup Weekend, Sparkathon, and many more amazing events encouraging student innovation.

Jai Chadha is an incoming freshman at Yale University passionate about the intersection of technology and business with experience organizing TonkaHacks, a hackathon encouraging students to build computer science projects to positively impact the world and TEDxMinnetonkaHS, a TEDx talk centred around creating a technological future.

I (put name here) am an incoming freshman at Purdue University interested in emerging technology and entrepreneurship and part of Futurist Academy, a non-profit helping students explore their passions within emerging tech and STEM.

I’ve attended my fair share of 9 AM — 9 PM hackathons, pulling my hair out over gradle errors and centering divs. I’ve also competed in DECA, a high school business and entrepreneurship club, for business plan startup competitions.

After competing in and seeing both hackathons and DECA startup competitions in action, although each having a different purpose, we believed that each of the competitions had something that the other didn’t.

Hackathons seemed to value the thrill and excitement of building something in the moment, resulting in tech made for the coolness factor but not particularly focused on a long-term idea or product.

The lack of perspective with developing a product with actual customers in mind made hackathon projects difficult to transition into a startup. I personally thought this was unfocused potential, and the same experience could be focused towards creating an actual product if more foundational steps were taken on the business side.

On the other hand, business plan competitions that had tech products had projects with detailed customer outlines, revenue models, and problem statements but lacked the reality check of actually developing said idea.

Ideas in those competitions looked great on paper, but the product development and perspective of actually building said idea was not taken into consideration. In many cases, this can make or break the tech startup in the early stage.

Although these events target two different groups of people–those interested in tech and business. In the real-world, these types of people work together in building a startup idea, yet there was no competitions available that played to both.

With COVID in full-effect, it was a perfect opportunity to start a virtual tech startup competition to fill this grey area. Providing the opportunity to make cool tech along with development perspective from hackathons coupled with the market understanding and business principles from startup competitions, Jumpstart came to fruition.

Keeping in mind that students were our focus, we wanted this event to be a career exploration opportunity and be as real-world as possible.

Our team decided to position the event as a way for a student interested in business to learn about business aspects of a startup and vice versa for a student interested in tech.

The collective business and tech start-up experience along with the career development opportunity became our value statement.

The main aspects involved in creating this value for Jumpstart were:

Event structure: How long is the event? What happens each day of the competition?

Our 3-day structure maintains the thrill throughout the weekend like hackathons, while providing enough time to build prototype ideas.

Spreading workshops throughout Saturday allows for teams to check-in to workshop topics they get stuck with as they develop. This structure is common and proven method in hackathons such as hack:now and HTNE.

Resources: How will students learn and grow during the event?

This includes our workshops, Jumpstart Playbook, and mentors. Workshops covered topics in both business and technology, allowing for teams to get a wide angle view on a startup from experiences of many industry professionals.

Grading criteria: How will the competition criteria reflect that we give students with all skillsets in business and tech a fair chance in being successful in the competition?

This all comes down to grading functionality. Teams that have a coding barrier were given the option to make a Product Requirements Documentation (PRD) — in a nutshell it’s a document that you can give to a team of people who actually know how to code and they can make what you’re thinking of. This allowed teams without coding experience to gain insight on what it takes to actually develop the idea.