Organised by venture capital firm Grupara Inc. and accelerator Techstars, the three-day startup coaching event and competition was participated in by 120 participants divided into 20 teams. Exceeding the targetted quota of 100 participants, despite being dominated by Indonesians, it also had participants from the US, Japan, and South Korea.
Winners were chosen by judges Aryo Ariotedja (Managing Partner at Grupara), Stefan Jung (Managing Partner at Venturra Capital), Steven Vanada (VP of CyberAgent Ventures), and Tim Marbach (CEO & Founder at Asia Venture Group) based on ‘investability’, social impact and growth potential.
The champion Do-Cart is a B2B platform for F&B and agribusiness that helps small and medium businesses meet vendors through an online portal. Cutting the involvement of middlemen, businesses are able to buy goods directly from farmers at a fair and honest price.
Runner-up Konsaato is a crowdfunding platform for live concerts, in which fans can help invest to bring their favourite international artists to town. The platform focusses on bringing Japanese artists to Indonesia, and vice versa.
Meanwhile, Future of Indonesia is a collaboration platform for civic engagement where users can post proposed solutions for social problems. Users can vote for the best solutions, and it also includes a gamification element to encourage participation.
All the winners received shopping vouchers from HappyFresh, Maskoolin and Doku, as well as three months’ worth of free office space at Freeware Spaces.
Startup.Weekend-fin
e27 observed that although participants are in a wide variety of business sectors, there seemed to be a common theme among most of the participants.
Productivity hacks were one of the most popular kinds of service. There was Chicken Time, an app that notifies your colleagues and friends if you wake up late, and Sch-Work, an Asana-like platform for government officials.
There are also Total Autocare, which reminds users to service their cars, and CanCook, which helps generate recipes based on what is available in the users’ refrigerator.
Crowdfunding was also a big theme at Startup Weekend Jakarta. Apart from Konsaato, there was also Bricklik, a crowdfunding platform for property investments.
There were also Kiyoo, an online marketplace for rented furniture and Workstree, a platform for creative freelancers that enables clients to also hire their services as a group.
While Ariotedja praised the variety of ideas coming in this year, he also stressed the importance for participants to master key presentation skills such as elevator pitch.
“I see that many of them still have tendency to ramble at the beginning of their presentation. And for some participants, it also took us a while to understand what their business is all about … They have to be able to explain their product in one to two sentences,” he said.
“I hope that they will continue what they have started in this competition,” he closed.