Start Ups launched in 54 hours
April 13, 2015
Over 50 budding entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers and dreamers took to The Nexus Innovation Centre in UL from April 10th to 12th to create a startup in just 54 hours.
Startup Weekend Limerick organised by Shane McCarthy and Stephen Dunworth of Bluechief social, Kieran Normoyle of Deviate Aspire and Peter Hunt of Node is a weekend long, hands-on experience where entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if their startup ideas are feasible.
The weekend kicked off on Friday evening with 27 open mic 60 second business pitches; teams formed around the nine successful pitches. Over Saturday and Sunday teams were focused on customer development, validating their ideas, and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams pitched their business idea to a panel of experts and after a few grueling questions from the Judges, Fruittopia were announced as the overall winners of the weekend.
Bluechief Founder and StartupWeekend organiser Shane McCarthy commented “This was an unbelievable opportunity for people to get involved in startups, test and pitch ideas and network over an intensive weekend. The response has been amazing and participation exceeded expectations. We’ve had mentors and guest speakers travel from the four corners of Ireland just to be in Limerick for startup weekend. Even those who didn’t actively participate followed on twitter. #swlimerick trended No. 1 over the weekend, the twitter feed was electric. Such was the response from our social media followers that we’ve even had offers of support from mentors as far afield as Malaysia”.
Frittopia who will take up residence in Nexus weren’t the only success story from the weekend, from a total of 53 weekend participants, 9 business ideas were selected and outstandingly 7 of those 9 companies are moving forward to develop the ideas further and proceed to start up stage.
The next Startup Weekend Limerick, which is set to be even more successful than the last, will take place on the 12th to 14th of June in Nexus.
-Simone Power