Big Sky Economic Development News

Startup Weekend in Colorado Springs

Feb 14, 2019

Upon arriving at the Epicenter Coworking Space Friday evening I was greeted by a room full of entrepreneurs eager to pitch their technology ideas and assemble a team of strangers to develop it.  Although the weekend is designed to be a learning experience, it turns out that 12% of teams have gone on to develop successful companies.  The most notable of which is Zapier.

To give you a sense for how the weekend works, here’s a quick breakdown.  On Friday, everyone with an idea pitches, participants then vote on the ideas they like the most and judges pick the top 6.  Teams then assemble and have 54 hours to validate their idea, analyze their market, and develop working prototypes before they pitch to an audience and judges on Sunday night.

The platform my team developed was called Converge.  A web and mobile app that consolidates all unique experiences and events available in Billings MT into one place.  With Converge, corporations would have one place to go to for all their team building events, hotels would have a compelling reason to get guests to stay one more day, and people new to Billings or just visiting would finally have one consolidated platform to find an answer to, “what is there to do in Billings MT?”

Unfortunately, in the end we lost to a dating app but the learning experience powerful.  It’s amazing how quickly you bond with strangers when everyone has a shared purpose and a quick deadline.

Here’s a link to the working prototype we created:

-Kevin Scharfe